The Texas Longhorns don’t deserve the 5th seed in the college football playoffs. They really don’t. UT should be the 3rd seed.
The first version of the 12-team CFP has drawn a lot of criticism from around the country for its seemingly unbalanced design. The feeling is that giving the top four conference champions a first round bye is too much of a reward. Especially, for weaker conferences like the ACC, Mountain West or the Big 12.
Fox Sports Joel Klatt is one of those calling for seeding the playoff according to the CFP Rankings as opposed to handing top seeds to conference winners. “It’s not a true meritocracy,” Klatt said, “Now it’s not a true playoff. It’s not a true bracket. You set out to do something like value the conference championship game and in doing so you devalued the conference championship game. … We don’t artificially pull the levers of power to bump teams up based on sentiment.”
Under the current format, the top four conference champions from the SEC, Big Ten, ACC, Big 12 and highest ranked Group of 5 get the top four seeds and a first round bye. The fifth team in that group makes the playoff but doesn’t get a top seed.
This differs greatly from the NCAA College Basketball Tournament. March Madness has a very successful and very popular format. Every conference champion makes the tournament, but no team gets a preferential seed based solely on that.
The hoops model is the format Texas coach Steve Sarkisian prefers. He told ESPN on Selection Sunday, “I look to the NCAA Basketball Tournament. If you win your conference tournament you get an automatic bid into the tournament. But then there’s seedings. Right? There’s one seeds, there’s two seeds, so on and so forth. And no where in there does it say that if you win your conference you get an automatic one seed. And so, I think if we can get to that model from a football perspective moving forward, that teams get seeded predicated on their ranking.”
Steve Sarkisian joins the Selection Show pic.twitter.com/WOkM54tytl
— Nash (@NashTalksTexas) December 8, 2024
The result of handing lower level teams high seeds is teams like the Longhorns are moved down and have to play an extra game. “The reality of it is, if we went just off of ranking, we would be the third seed in the tournament as opposed to the fifth. If we go by that (basketball) model, yes there’s automatic bids into the tournament, but that doesn’t necessarily give you, let’s call it a one seed where you get that bye in the first round,” Sark said.
Another bi-product of moving lower ranked teams up is some of the deserving top seeds get a tougher path because higher ranked teams are lower in the bracket.
Klatt points out, Oregon may have been done in most by the format. “Congratulation Dan Lanning and the Oregon Ducks,” Klatt said. “You got absolutely screwed by the playoff committee because their sentiment of trying to create artificial floors rose some of these teams to levels where they shouldn’t be. That’s the problem. The reward for 13-0 and having the best regular season in all of college football, which is supposed to be the most valuable regular season in all of sports, the reward for that is having to play the highest odds teams to win the national championship. They’re going to have to possibly go through Ohio State, Texas and Georgia to win the national championship.”
If the bracket was set the rankings, Texas would have a No. 3 seed, an extra week off and a path deserving of the consensus third ranked team in the nation.