Georgia’s emphatic 28-7 win over Alabama in the SEC Championship Game on Saturday punched the Bulldogs’ ticket to the College Football Playoff, while also giving them bragging rights in the SEC as conference champions. But Georgia’s College Football fate was already settled going into Saturday. It was going to be in no matter what. It was just a matter of whether it would be as a top-four seed with a bye into the quarterfinals.
Now we know it will have all of that.
Alabama’s CFP future was a little cloudier.
Obviously, a win would have put them in as the SEC champions, but a loss was going to create some intense discussion as to whether or not their resume is good enough to get in with three losses, and whether or not a conference championship loss should punish them.
In this case, it should. Especially given the context of everything else happening at the top of the rankings.
Alabama should be left out of the College Football Playoff
The arguments are going to be predictable, and ABC’s Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit already started the cage-rattling and shameless PR propaganda for the SEC in the closing seconds of the broadcast.
Alabama and SEC supporters will scream from the mountaintops about how tough the SEC is and how brutal conference play is week-in and week-out.
They will argue about how a conference championship loss should not hurt the Crimson Tide, while also hypocritically pointing out BYU’s ugly loss to Texas Tech in the Big 12 game earlier on Saturday.
They will talk about Alabama having big regular-season wins over Georgia and Missouri.
But none of it changes the simple reality surrounding the Crimson Tide right now: They just do not look like a playoff team.
Nor do they have the resume of an at-large playoff team.
Even though Saturday’s loss was a conference championship game loss, it was an emphatic loss in a game where they were not even remotely competitive against Georgia. They lost by three touchdowns, finished the game with only 209 yards of total offense (including minus-three yards rushing) and were never, at any point, in it. It was a one-sided beat-down from the opening kickoff.
They were out-classed and out-played.
When you add that on to the fact that one of Alabama’s three losses was a ghastly defeat to what turned out to be a bad Florida State team to open the season, and how they had to scratch and claw out wins against unranked teams like South Carolina, LSU and Auburn down the stretch, it’s just not an overly impressive team. Even in the SEC.
The big debate for the committee before Sunday’s noon announcement is going to come down to Alabama, Miami and Notre Dame, and whether or not the former should drop behind the latter two teams (when they did not play in conference championship games).
A lot of things matter in this discussion, and the eye-test and how all of these teams are playing right now are among them. It is hard to look at Alabama, Notre Dame and Miami and conclude that Alabama is the best of those three teams.
While Miami and Notre Dame have been routing teams down the stretch, Alabama has barely been escaping. On Saturday, it did not even show up for the fight. That has to be disqualifying.
