Alabama AD Greg Byrne Says School Will 'Assess' Future Scheduling After CFP Snub

Alabama athletics director Greg Byrne said in a statement on Sunday that he was disappointed by his school's team being left out of the 12-team College Football Playoff and said the school would need to reevaluate how it schedules non-conference games in the future.

"We have said that we would need to see how strength of the schedule would be evaluated by the CFP," Byrne wrote. "With this outcome, we will need to asses how many P4 non-conference games make sense in the future to put us in the best position to participate in the CFP. That is not good for college football."

The Crimson Tide were left out of the College Football Playoff after the committee favored SMU, which fell to Clemson in the ACC Championship but finished the season 11-2. Alabama, which finished the season 9-3, would have been the only team with three losses to receive an at-large bid had it been selected.

College Football Playoff committee chair Warde Manuel explained that Alabama's upset losses outweighed its wins when the committee made its decision.

"We looked at the number of wins Alabama had against ranked opponents," Manuel said on ESPN's selection show (h/t Sports Illustrated's Katie Windham). "We looked at SMU's schedule, and they were undefeated in conference. Their losses were to ranked teams. We also looked at Alabama's losses to unranked teams, and it was quite a debate. "

Alabama had some of the most impressive wins of the season, like its victory over Georgia in September and wins over South Carolina and Missouri, but its losses made the difference. The Crimson Tide faced an upset against Vanderbilt in October before losing to Tennessee later in the month. While those two losses didn't ruin their CFP chances, a blowout loss to unranked Oklahoma likely sealed the Crimson Tide's fate.

To Byrne's point, Alabama had the 11th-best strength of record in the country while SMU came in at 15th, according to ESPN.

But Alabama's impressive schedule comes more from its grueling conference matchups than it does from its non-conference games. The Crimson Tide had just one Power 4 non-conference matchup, a 42-10 win over Wisconsin. That road win is somewhat impressive, but the Badgers finished 5-7 with no ranked wins. Alabama's other non-conference wins came against Western Kentucky, South Florida, and Mercer.

Scheduling a lighter non-conference schedule likely wouldn't have made a difference in Alabama's CFP chances this year. Instead, the Crimson Tide's snub was a result of its conference losses. There's nothing Byrne can do about his team's conference schedule as the league decides those games.