Gary Patterson Criticizes College Football Playoff Committee for Leaving out TCU

It took until April, but TCU coach Gary Patterson has finally broken his silence when it comes to being left out of the initial College Football Playoff.    

Dennis Dodd of CBSSports.com noted that the Horned Frogs' leader spoke to a small group of reporters and was critical of dropping from No. 3 to No. 6 in the final rankings despite beating Iowa State 55-3 in his team’s last regular-season game. The eventual national champion Ohio State Buckeyes leapfrogged TCU after destroying Wisconsin 59-0 in the Big Ten Championship Game.

Dodd passed along some of Patterson’s comments:

"

I was told the reason we had a [selection] committee is we were going to take all that stuff out of it. [Conference] championship games shouldn't have mattered.

Their job was to watch all this film and pick the four best teams no matter who you played, what you did. All the sudden it came down to, ‘Well, they played a championship game but they didn't.' That's not what we were told. We were told they were going to pick the four best teams.

"

Interestingly, Dodd noted that Patterson told Iowa State coach Paul Rhoads before their two teams squared off that he believed his own squad would not reach the playoff. Turns out, he was right.

Patterson was also quick to point out that things may have gone differently if his team was a national brand school, like a Texas, Oklahoma or the Ohio State squad that got into the playoffs instead.

"There was that motto out there, if we would have been an Oklahoma and Texas with a larger fan base and sold more T-shirts, that we would have been in the playoffs," he said. "I think we gained more possibly by not being in the playoffs -- and how we handled it -- than by being in the playoffs."

That may be the case, but TCU suffered a 61-58 loss to Baylor, and the Bears ultimately ended the season in the No. 5 spot in the playoff rankings. It would have been difficult to explain to Baylor how it was left out of the top four in favor of a team it beat in a head-to-head matchup from its own conference.

By including Ohio State instead of Baylor or TCU, the potential controversy of choosing between Big 12 teams was eliminated.

If the Big 12 had a conference title game that allowed its teams to make one final statement against quality competition like the Buckeyes did, things may have unfolded differently for the eventual winner as well. However, David Ubben of Fox Sports Southwest believes there is a downside to that avenue moving forward:

TCU ultimately made a rather loud statement when it dismantled an Ole Miss team from the mighty SEC to the tune of 42-3 in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl.

Of course, that statement may have rung louder if the Ohio State squad that controversially jumped TCU didn’t go out and knock off Alabama and Oregon en route to a national title or the Michigan State team that Ohio State beat during the season didn't win the Cotton Bowl against the same Baylor squad that beat TCU.

All is not lost for the Horned Frogs, though, especially after the bowl performance.

Quarterback Trevone Boykin is one of many talented returnees, and TCU figures to be among the top two or three teams in the country when the initial polls come out before the 2015 season. As long as it takes care of business, it is difficult to envision a scenario where it would be left out of the playoff this year.   

That may not help remove the pain of being left out a season ago, but at least the Horned Frogs have a bright future to look forward to in 2015 and beyond.