Winners and Losers of College Football Selection Sunday
To the surprise of no one, Alabama is No. 1 in the final College Football Playoff rankings. In the Peach Bowl, the Crimson Tide will draw No. 4 Washington, which is a decision certain to be argued in the days, weeks and months to come.
For the other national semifinal, it'll be No. 2 Clemson vs. No. 3 Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl, with Clemson serving as one of the biggest winners of Selection Sunday, jumping up to that second spot with its ACC championship victory last night.
But what of the Big Ten champion Nittany Lions? Why were they left out for winning the best conference in the nation?
And why did ESPN's selection show have to be drawn out for four hours just for us to spend the last 90 minutes of it searching Twitter for 85 percent of the bowl pairings?
More than three months of regular season football all boiled down to this. Read on for the biggest winners and losers from Selection Sunday.
Winner: Washington Huskies
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No. 4 in this year's College Football Playoff rankings almost feels like more of a punishment than a reward, but it'll be No. 4 Washington in the Peach Bowl against No. 1 Alabama.
There will be much gnashing of teeth and pounding of fists over which teams were most deserving of getting into that final spot, but the one thing we learned from more than a month of CFP rankings and debates is that there is no cut-and-dry correct answer. In the end, it comes down to 12 people arguing for and against various metrics until some sort of consensus is reached, and the Huskies won out.
"The selection committee believes Washington is a better football team when compared with Penn State," said CFP committee chairman Kirby Hocutt on the ESPN broadcast.
Jake Browning and company had a fantastic season. Washington went 12-1 and finished strong, blowing out both Washington State and Colorado to first clinch a spot in the Pac-12 title game and then to win that championship. The Huskies also blew out Stanford and had a crucial road win over Utah.
More than the noteworthy wins, though, the biggest thing working in Washington's favor was probably the lack of anything close to a bad loss.
Not only did Penn State and Michigan each have two losses, they each had a loss to a team that finished outside the AP Top 20. Washington's only loss of the season came against USC, which finished the season at No. 9 in the AP poll and which finished the season on an eight-game winning streak. Even though it was a home loss for the Huskies, it was perhaps the most forgivable loss that any contender suffered this season, given how well the Trojans played down the stretch.
Regardless of the rationale the selection committee used, we'll be watching the Huskies on New Year's Eve. It's time to stop arguing over who deserved to get in and time to start thinking about how in the world Washington's offensive line will hold up against the Crimson Tide.
Loser: Big Ten Championship
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There's no debating that the Big Ten was the best conference in the country this season. In the initial CFP rankings back in early November, there were five teams from the Big Ten in the top 12. In each of the past two weeks, there were four Big Ten teams in the top seven.
Yet, somehow, Penn State won the Big Ten championship game and was left out of the College Football Playoff, leaving many to wonder if they had been duped by several years of hearing how important it is to win a conference championship.
The particularly frustrating thing for the Nittany Lions is that they were effectively penalized for trying to put together a strong schedule, playing nonconference games against eight-win Pittsburgh and 10-win Temple while Washington faced Idaho, Rutgers and FCS school Portland State.
ESPN's Joey Galloway had some strong thoughts on the nonconference scheduling debate during the ESPN broadcast:
"If I'm Penn State, I'm not looking to go find Temple. I'm not looking to go find Pittsburgh. I'm going to look for Portland State. I'm going to try to run the table in a weak out-of-conference schedule as opposed to testing my depth, testing my toughness and testing my recruiting like an Ohio State or an Alabama would."
Chris Fowler offered similar thoughts on the matter on the broadcast:
"In college football now, it's about making the playoff. The decisions about how to schedule to get into this playoff, you don't want them to look for the path of least resistance. It's just not good for the game to schedule nonconference games the way Washington did."
The fact of the matter is we probably should have seen this coming five weeks ago when the committee debuted Texas A&M at No. 4 in its rankings, despite a 19-point loss to Alabama and a nonconference schedule that consisted of home wins over sub-.500 UCLA, sub-.500 New Mexico State and FCS school Prairie View A&M.
Scheduling aggressively certainly helped Ohio State. The Buckeyes almost certainly get left out of the CFP if we replace their 21-point road win over Oklahoma with a 60-point home win over Florida A&M. But, if Penn State replaces its three-point road loss to Pittsburgh with a 60-point home win over Florida A&M, the Nittany Lions would also be in the national semifinals right now.
It's a scary precedent where the reward isn't worth the risk, and we're probably going to see more teams take, as Fowler called it, "the path of least resistance," since Washington wasn't penalized for it.
Winner: Clemson Tigers
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Though the Big Ten championship wasn't enough to bump Penn State into the top four, the ACC championship helped elevate Clemson to No. 2 in the final CFP rankings.
Ultimately, the swap with No. 3 Ohio State means nothing other than a change in jersey color. According to RJ Bell of ESPN Radio, the Buckeyes are still favored by a field goal over the now-higher-ranked Tigers.
Regardless of what happens in the national semifinals, though, this was a vote of confidence for Clemson from the CFP selection committee.
The Tigers seemed to spend the entire season refusing to live up to their potential. Half of their 12 wins came by a one-possession margin, including a way-too-close-for-comfort home win over Troy and a home game against North Carolina State in which a last-second field goal should have ended Clemson's quest for the CFP.
But the Tigers did just enough to win the ACC and appear to be playing their best football right now. Deshaun Watson was banged up early in the season, but he has accounted for 11 touchdowns in his last two games and will have nearly a full month to rest up for the Playoff. Meanwhile, Mike Williams and Wayne Gallman are bowling straight through would-be tacklers.
Granted, there's a thick line between beating a .500 South Carolina team and preparing to face the Buckeyes, but the Tigers earned their spot at No. 2 and are hoping to return Alabama the favor of upsetting them in last year's championship game.
.jpg?w=256 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
Loser: College Football Playoff Selection Show
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Why in the world did that take so long?
The College Football Playoff selection committee had more than 12 hours after the final game ended to make its decisions, yet we had to wait half an hour longer before any of the rankings were revealed. Then, after finally seeing the top six, we were forced to wait two more hours to see the rest of the New Year's Six games.
And it was all for no good reason other than a ratings grab spent making us listen to the same arguments we've been hearing all week long.
Once the top four was settled, there was almost no debate over what the remaining NY6 matchups would be. We knew No. 5 Penn State would be in the Rose Bowl against USC. We also knew No. 6 Michigan would be in the Orange Bowl against Florida State. Oklahoma was an automatic selection for the Sugar Bowl after winning the Big 12, and Western Michigan was clearly going to the Cotton Bowl.
The only relative unknowns were the SEC's representative in the Sugar Bowl (Auburn) and Western Michigan's opponent in the Cotton Bowl (Wisconsin), but those were reasonable assumptions to make based on the results of Championship Week and the previous batch of CFP rankings.
Put it this way: I had those last two paragraphs finalized 15 minutes after we found out Washington was No. 4 in the rankings. That was so painfully and pointlessly drawn out. Remind us to not even tune in until 2:30 next year.
Winner: Points in Boca Raton Bowl
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For most of bowl season, there are multiple games to choose from on any given day. We get the party started with five games on Dec. 17. The 26th-31st will each have at least three games per day.
But Dec. 20 has just one game. It's the Boca Raton Bowl. And even though it's the only game being played on that particular Tuesday, it will still be almost impossible to keep up with all the points that will be scored.
That's because it's a battle between Western Kentucky and Memphis—two high-powered offenses that don't exactly bring the hammer on the defensive side of the ball.
Only Louisville scored more points per game than the Hilltoppers did this season, and the Cardinals only narrowly edged them out at 45.3 to 45.1. Led by Mike White and Anthony Wales, Western Kentucky has scored at least 44 points in nine consecutive games, including a 58-44 win over Louisiana Tech in the Conference USA championship game.
Western Kentucky has punted a grand total of six times in its last four games.
But the Tigers can put points on the board in a hurry, too. They scored 48 against Houston one week ago and have not been held to fewer than 24 points in a game yet this season. But they also gave up at least 42 points on five occasions and allowed an average of 44.2 points per game against their five opponents that became bowl-eligible.
Don't be surprised when the Boca Raton Bowl has the highest over/under of any bowl game, and don't be surprised when the over hits midway through the third quarter.
Loser: Points in the Outback Bowl
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Memphis vs. Western Kentucky should be the most up-and-down, back-and-forth of the 41 games yet to come in December and January.
Iowa vs. Florida in the Outback Bowl is a completely different story and might be an unwatchable slog of trench warfare.
Aside from the truly elite defensive teams like Alabama, Ohio State and Michigan, the Hawkeyes and Gators have two of the stingiest defenses in the country. Each allowed an average of just 17.9 points per game this season, and that's with Florida's number ballooning after recent losses to Florida State and Alabama. Prior to those games, the Gators were allowing a near-national best 13.0 points per contest.
Now consider that defenses haven't even needed to work all that hard to slow down these offenses. In terms of average yards per game, Florida ranks 115th nationally at 345.1, which is still better than Iowa at 120th with 333.3 yards per game. No other team that won at least seven games finished worse than 106th in those rankings.
The Boca Raton Bowl should be a shootout, determined by the last team to possess the ball. The Outback Bowl might be decided by a safety.
Winner: Stability in the Rankings
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After months of hearing about how important conference championships are in the College Football Playoff rankings, they ended up changing virtually nothing.
The only significant movers in the final CFP rankings were the two teams that played in the AAC championship game. Temple debuted at No. 24, finishing one spot ahead of Navy, which dropped from No. 19 to No. 25 for its 24-point loss to the Owls.
Penn State did climb two spots, leapfrogging Michigan to become the Big Ten's representative in the Rose Bowl, but that was the only significant change that came out of what was supposed to be the most important weekend of the entire season.
Colorado was embarrassed by Washington and only dropped two spots to No. 10. Likewise, Florida was blown out by Alabama and is still somehow regarded as the 17th-best team in the country.
Aside from Navy falling six spots while suffering multiple season-ending injuries in a loss, no team jumped or dropped more than two spots from last week.
It was a fun final Saturday of football, but based on the results and the subsequent lack of changes in the poll, it ended up not meaning a whole lot.
Loser: Bowl Projectors
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After they meticulously proofread their bowl projections to make sure the correct conferences were in the correct bowls, ESPN opted to slap every prognosticator in the face by just doing whatever it wanted with the bowl games it owns.
One of the matchups that was announced by ESPN.com's Brett McMurphy late Saturday night was the St. Petersburg Bowl. All season long, we were led to believe this would be made up of teams from Conference USA, American or the third tier from the ACC. As such, we had St. Pete down for South Florida vs. Wake Forest in last week's bowl projections.
Instead, what we're getting is MAC vs. SEC in the form of Miami (OH) vs. Mississippi State.
To be fair, the bowl committees can only stick with the conference tie-ins for so long. For example, the SEC has 12 bowl-eligible teams, but it isn't committed to that many bowls. Mississippi State (5-7) was always going to wind up in some wild card game because of that.
Same goes for the Las Vegas Bowl. That game was supposed to be the Mountain West champion against the fifth-best non-NY6 team from the Pac-12. However, with only six bowl-eligible teams from the Pac-12 and two of them headed for New Year's Six games, there weren't enough West Coast teams to fill that slot. Thus, Houston jumped up from the AAC and grabbed it—which is probably why there isn't a team from the AAC in the St. Petersburg Bowl. The domino effect is real and massive.
Again, there were always going to be some unpredictable matchups, but it was a hectic and frustrating Saturday night for prognosticators as the outliers were among the first pairings announced.
Winner and Loser: Florida State Seminoles
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Congratulations to the Florida State Seminoles!
Despite a 63-20 loss to Louisville back in September and subsequent home losses to North Carolina and Clemson, you were rated by the College Football Playoff selection committee as the second-best team in the ACC. Thanks to an ugly finish by the Cardinals, you were ranked two spots ahead of Louisville and will now get to represent the ACC in the Orange Bowl.
"The selection committee felt like Florida State was the better football team (than Louisville) at the end of this season... We're looking at the full body of work and we're not basing our rankings and our decisions on one particular game," said CFP committee chairman Kirby Hocutt during the broadcast.
And now, let's say a prayer for the poor Seminoles, who have the daunting task of facing a Michigan team that spent most of the past week being praised as one of the four best teams in the country without a resume to match.
The Wolverines were inches away from facing Clemson in the Fiesta Bowl. Had they been able to stop J.T. Barrett on fourth down in the second overtime one week ago, they would have been in Ohio State's spot.
Instead, by the time the Orange Bowl kicks off, Jim Harbaugh and company will have spent more than a month stewing over that missed opportunity, determined to come out and make a statement against Deondre Francois and Dalvin Cook.
Outside of Alabama, there wasn't a better defense in the country this season than the one Michigan put on the field week after week. And if you spent any time #TalkinBoutTheNoles this year, you know that Francois spent seemingly the entire season running from pressure and trying to peel himself off the ground after taking yet another big hit.
Anything could happen in the Orange Bowl in Miami, which is much more of a home game for the Seminoles than it is for the Wolverines. However, it's not hard to preemptively feel bad for the offensive line that drew Michigan on Selection Sunday.
.jpg?w=480 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
