Oklahoma deserves Playoff, but Georgia’s one of 4 best - SB Nation

We ask the College Football Playoff committee to perform an impossible task. They are supposed to select the four best teams in the country, but what does that mean — the four teams most likely to win a game tomorrow? The teams that have been the best all year?

Even with the vagueness, we know it’s not just about “best.”

For instance, Ohio State might have been the best team in the country last season, but the Buckeyes lost two regular season games, including one in blowout fashion to a borderline top-50 team. That was a disqualifier, even if pure quality was on OSU’s side.

We know your actual wins and losses matter, too. We say “best,” but we know “deserving” matters, too.

If it were purely about “best” — if college football were about to reveal the bracket for a basketball-style, 68-team tournament — we know Kirby Smart’s Georgia Bulldogs would easily be in the field, and they’d be one of the field’s favorites. If given the opportunity to play Lincoln Riley’s Oklahoma Sooners, they’d be favored, both by Vegas and S&P+.

The Dawgs are indeed one of the best teams in the country.

The Dawgs are also undeserving of one of the four spots in the College Football Playoff.

Because Smart is good at his job, he started politicking for a spot in the moments following UGA’s Saturday evening loss to Alabama.

“It boils down to one thing,” Smart told reporters after the game. “Do you want the four best teams in or not? It’s that simple. [Alabama] sat at home last year [during the SEC Championship] and got to go in the game while everyone else was beating each other up, and they had a good football team.”

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey joined the chorus, and even Alabama head coach Nick Saban agreed that he’d rather not play Georgia again. Saban had no reason to join in, but the coordinated effort from Smart, Sankey, and others was predictable but, honestly, had some elements of truth on its side.

NCAA Football: SEC Championship-Alabama vs Georgia — Kirby Smart

It doesn’t matter, though. Oklahoma should get the No. 4 seed and face No. 1 Alabama in the CFP semifinals. Here’s why.

In 2016, two-loss Penn State both won the Big Ten and beat one-loss Ohio State, but the committee still put the Buckeyes in the CFP field instead of the Nittany Lions. In 2017, Ohio State missed out only because of its second loss. We know that second loss matters.

Oklahoma lost once, by 3 points, to a team that was in the CFP committee’s penultimate top 15, then avenged that loss on Saturday in the Big 12 Championship. OU won road games at the CFP’s No. 16 (WVU) and No. 23 (Iowa State) teams, giving them three wins over top-25 teams — the same number as Georgia (No. 9 Florida, No. 15 Kentucky, and No. 24 Missouri).

The Sooners’ big non-conference game of the season was dimmed when UCLA collapsed between the time the game was signed and when it was actually played, but Army tried to make up for that — the Black Knights, who took the Sooners to overtime in September, are at least ranked by the AP.

To be sure, either of Georgia’s losses is defensible — a neutral site loss to No. 1 Bama on Saturday and a 20-point road loss to No. 10 LSU in Baton Rouge in October. But the LSU game was Georgia’s mulligan; the Dawgs were out-manned and out-classed that day, and while they responded with nearly perfect play over the next month and change, you don’t tend to get a second mulligan, no matter how hard your schedule is.

It’s not just that the Bulldogs have the same number of top-25 wins and more losses — it’s that they also don’t have the Conference Champion! card to play.

The CFP committee has refrained from putting a two-loss team in the field so far, though part of that is just circumstantial; we know, for instance, that they would have put two-loss Auburn in the field in 2017 had the Tigers beaten Georgia in the SEC Championship.

It’ll happen one day. But it’ll probably happen for a conference champ.

One of the biggest supposed marks against OU isn’t the Sooners’ résumé — which matches or exceeds Georgia’s by the tools the CFP committee tends to use, as showed above — is that the Sooners’ defense stinks.

And my lord, it does. This makes OU a team with poor “balance,” a term the committee chairs often use when speaking publicly.

OU allowed 6.3 yards per play against Texas on Saturday, nearly a yard per play higher than the Longhorns’ season average, and we reacted like the Sooners had just channeled the 1985 Sooner defense or something. The bar is that low. Heading into the weekend, they were 84th in Def. S&P+; it almost goes without saying that that’s the lowest ranked unit of any team that will be playing in the CFP or a New Year’s Six bowl this year. It’s bad.

But it was bad last year, too — worse, actually, per S&P+. And OU still came within an overtime period of beating Georgia for a spot in the national title game.

When your offense is nearly a full touchdown better than anyone else’s in college football, that gives you quite a bit of leeway.

If they were 10 points per game better on defense (which would make them about 26th in Def. S&P+) and 10 points worse on offense (which, incredibly, would drop them to only about fourth), would that make them a better team?

No. S&P+ would grade them out the same, and they’d probably have about the same record.

So why the hell should “balance” matter? It shouldn’t. Hell, even the NFL is beginning to embrace things like “points” and “yards,” and Riley’s name has been bandied about as a candidate for NFL jobs because of his offensive prowess. If the joyless No Fun League can look with favor at Riley, why should the committee enforce one vision of how to win football games on Oklahoma?

It’s harsh, but it’s true.

If you look past the fact that OU’s résumé is comparable by the standards the committee uses, and if you look past the fact that OU is a conference champion and Georgia isn’t, you still come to this: if the goal is to find a semifinal opponent for Alabama, wouldn’t a pretty good final tie-breaker be “Choose the team that didn’t just lose to Alabama?”

Granted, rematches happen, and they can greatly benefit a team. After all, OU just avenged its only loss of the season, just as previous CFP runners-up 2014 Oregon (against Arizona) and 2017 Georgia (against Auburn) did in their conference title games.

But those were conference title games. The committee can only squeeze four teams into the Playoff (for now, ahem), so the dividing lines can be pretty thin. If Georgia had wanted to get into the field of four, then it a) shouldn’t have gotten destroyed by LSU, or b) shouldn’t have blown a double-digit lead to Alabama and given up the winning points to the backup QB.

That’s how Georgia put its fate in someone else’s hands.