For some inexplicable reason, Fox Sports let Nick Saban's 11th hour media tour pleading his case for Alabama to make the College Football Playoff on at halftime of the Big 10 Championship game. Never mind Fox just signed a lucrative and long-term deal, worth over $7 billion and spanning seven years. Or that another team that was currently on the outside looking in was Ohio State, and Ryan Day (or Lincoln Riley, or Sonny Dykes) wasn't offered the same platform. Why was Nick Saban allowed to plead his case at all, especially then?
Saban: “I think you show vulnerability when you get beat badly at the end of the season. Our team has played better at the end of the season so that’s my reasoning.”
Yes, Ohio State lost their last game of the regular season when they got run off the field by Michigan. But that was their first loss of the season, while the last time anyone checked, Alabama has lost two games. Is Saban saying teams should be judged on *how* they lose, or when? I'll bet those style points wouldn't count, unless they're in Alabama's favor. If you're going to sit in judgment of how a team loses, don't lose to LSU and Tennessee and you wouldn't need to be having this debate.
Also, YOUR TEAM ISN"T PLAYING THIS WEEKEND, NICK. Are you really arguing TCU should be out for losing their conference championship game? If you're going to sneer at the strength of the Big 12, maybe don't barely squeak by Texas.
Saban: “What I would say to the committee or anyone else, if we played any of these teams who are on the edge of getting in, would we be the underdog? Or would we be the favorite? I think if we could answer that question and the goal is to get the best teams in there, I’d say they belong in there.”
The last time I checked, Vegas betting odds don't decide who plays in the college football playoffs.
Ultimately, Saban's pleas weren't heard. By Sunday morning, even Paul Finebaum was calling Saban's campaign "as inconsistent as his football team was this year."
And he may have waited until the absolute last minute to say it, but Finebaum was right when he said, "... as far as being favored in every game, that’s great. Nick Saban’s always favored. He’s only been the underdog I think once in his 15 years. Does that mean Nick Saban should have 15 national championships at Alabama instead of 6? That’s not how this is done, and that’s why Nick Saban is going to be disappointed in a couple of hours.”
No one knows how the discussions went down in the room with the committee, but I'd like to think that the many media members who spoke out about who they thought rightfully deserved to be in the CFB playoff, and who did not, helped. Were there people in that room who would have preferred Alabama over TCU or Ohio State? Probably. But they knew there would be backlash if they decided to ignore actual game results and did what they wanted to. Maybe they even knew the legitimacy of the committee was hanging in the balance, and you can't arbitrarily change the criteria of how you select teams to fit chasing the money and the TV eyeballs.
Ultimately, the tinfoil hat conspiracies and predictions that Alabama would somehow prevail and end up in the college football playoff did not happen. And that's good for college football,
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