Alabama's College Football Playoff ranking illustrates stranglehold SEC, Big Ten have on sport

What, did you really think the College Football Playoff selection committee was here to tell us that this sport had become more egalitarian than we have known it to be for the last 50 years? Did you really think that the first year of a 12-team playoff and the beautiful mess that this regular season produced was going to break up the stranglehold that the SEC and Big Ten have over every facet college sports?

Ha. Nice try. You’d have better odds of buying a winning lottery ticket than usurping the oligarchy that will always — always — get the benefit of the doubt when there’s a close call to be made.

And just look at what it’s going to potentially give us: Alabama at Notre Dame? Tennessee at Ohio State?

Oh yeah!

And also: Oh no!

Warde Manuel, the committee chairman, made it clear Tuesday night on ESPN that there’s only one result left on conference championship weekend that will materially impact the bracket. If Clemson beats SMU for the ACC title, the Tigers will move into the field as an automatic qualifier. And the Mustangs? Well, it’ll be a nervous Saturday night because the final spot in the field will pretty much come down to the Ponies and the Crimson Tide.

Gulp.

But even as it is, the new reality of college football is plain as day. We can talk all we want about NIL and the scheduling inequality in 16-team conferences and a new form of parity that seemed to bubble up all around the country this year. For goodness sakes, it took Georgia eight overtimes and an avalanche of friendly officiating calls down the stretch last Friday just to beat the ACC’s sixth-place team.

Yet at the end of the day, the College Football Playoff bracket is poised to have four SEC teams, four from the Big Ten, Notre Dame, the winner of Boise State-UNLV in the Mountain West, the winner of Arizona State-Iowa State in the Big 12 and SMU as the lone ACC representative if they take care of business against Clemson.

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In other words, there is no Power Four. There’s only a Power Two, and everyone else is left clawing at the scraps.

The committee’s decision to rank Alabama No. 11 is telling. Even at 9-3 with losses to Vanderbilt and arguably the worst Oklahoma team of the 21st century, the Crimson Tide is in position to get into this thing when it doesn’t really feel like they deserve it. Again.

You can go back to the BCS in 2011 when Alabama got the nod over Oklahoma State to play LSU for the BCS title despite having already lost to the Tigers in the regular season. You can look at 2017 when they didn’t win the SEC West but were chosen as one of the four best teams and won the whole thing. Or you can focus on last year when the one-loss Crimson Tide jumped over unbeaten Florida State for the fourth spot, largely due to Seminoles starting quarterback Jordan Travis being injured.

The trend is clear. Alabama always gets the benefit of the doubt, even in a year like this one where it’s hard to find a lot of data points that say they deserve it and even the Crimson Tide’s fans gave up on the season a couple weeks ago after the 24-3 embarrassment in Norman.

Manuel came armed Tuesday with an answer for why the committee liked Alabama ahead of 10-2 Miami or even other 9-3 teams like Ole Miss and South Carolina. He pointed to Alabama’s 3-1 record against teams currently in the top 25, which was the best of that group. He also pointed to the fact that Alabama is 6-1 against teams above .500 while Miami is 4-2.

Those are compelling points, if you ignore that Alabama’s two bad losses are worse than Miami’s two against Georgia Tech (the team that took Georgia to the wire) and a 9-3 Syracuse team ranked No. 22.

And I’m not saying that the committee is wrong here. Someone is going to get that 12th spot, and whoever it would be is destined to be flawed.

But if you're the ACC and Big 12, Tuesday had to be both clarifying and depressing. Yes, Miami has nobody to blame but itself for blowing a 21-0 lead at Syracuse last weekend, and Clemson probably would have had its spot in the field sewn up had it held onto a 14-7 lead going into the fourth quarter last weekend against South Carolina. Nobody is going to seriously argue that either of those teams are getting a raw deal.

But for the ACC to have four ranked teams and possibly get just one spot is a huge slap in the face. And the Big 12 has essentially been dismissed as a serious college football entity, treated no differently in the rankings than the American Athletic Conference. BYU is a 10-2 team with a defeat of SMU, a four-point loss to Kansas and a five-point loss to Arizona State and doesn’t even get a sniff at No. 18 in the rankings.

Meanwhile, Indiana is so protected by the Big Ten brand that the Hoosiers are just going to sail into this field at 11-1 despite beating nobody and getting destroyed in their only real test of the season at Ohio State.

As college football officials discussed expanding the playoff beyond 12 when the next television contract kicks in a couple years from now, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and the Big Ten’s Tony Petitti floated a 14-team playoff with four automatic bids for each of their leagues.

When that was rejected, the next discussion point centered on three guaranteed bids each for those two leagues and two each for the Big 12 and ACC. It’s unfair and unnecessary — even un-American, in a sense.  But after seeing the way this year’s bracket is playing out, they might have to think hard about taking that deal.

If the ACC and Big 12 are stuck in a position where they’ll need some luck and grace from the committee just to get a second team in, they’re in really deep trouble. Because Alabama is always going to be Alabama, and the truth about expanding the playoff to 12 or 14 or 16 teams is that it significantly lowers the bar for what the bluebloods need to accomplish to get into the playoff.

This Alabama team has been frustrating and underachieving and at times plain average under Kalen DeBoer. Yet they’re on the doorstep of getting in. Again.

If that comes to pass, it’ll make for some amazing blueblood-on-blueblood matchups and huge TV audiences. And it should end any notion that adding teams to the playoff was going to make this sport fairer.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Alabama's College Football Playoff ranking reveals SEC, Big Ten power