(Photo by Jevone Moore/Icon Sportswire)
The Alabama Crimson Tide discovered their playoff fate as they sat at home during conference championship week, narrowly left out of the expanded 12-team field despite the fact that they came in at No. 11 in the final rankings.
Due to automatic qualifying rules and Clemson effectively ‘stealing a bid’ by defeating SMU in the ACC Championship game, there simply weren’t enough spots to go around for a 9-3 Alabama team with some blemishes on its resume to make the field. And yes, the format is flawed and outright gimmicky and will be tweaked and fixed in the coming years.
A system where Alabama – or any team for that matter – is literally ranked as a top-12 team but deemed unworthy to compete in a 12-team playoff is laughable. All that being said, the Crimson Tide still has no one to blame but itself.
Avoiding a loss to a 6-6 Vanderbilt team — improved, but still Vanderbilt — and avoiding a complete flop against an Oklahoma team that had won just one conference game in the second-to-last week of the season would have positioned the Tide to make it without needing help from the committee.
The Oklahoma effort is particularly damning for an Alabama team that controlled its own destiny completely and had two inferior opponents ahead of it to lock up a playoff appearance in the Sooners and Auburn. Instead of doing that, they put up the most putrid offensive performance of the season and were held without a touchdown – albeit with a controversial call taking one off the board – in an embarrassing 24-3 beatdown.
It’s made even more frustrating with the fact that the Tide had a victory over the SEC Champions in Georgia early in the season — a victory that was the only thing keeping their argument alive down the stretch after the loss to Oklahoma.
That argument that the Tide’s strength of schedule should be outweighed over SMU making their conference title game is a valid one, but Alabama made their own bed by losing the weakest conference games on their schedule and now they must sleep in it during what will be a long, cold winter in Tuscaloosa.
Is Alabama one of the 12 best teams in the country? Probably. Would they have made a run in the playoff that would have began with a road game against Notre Dame or Penn State? Maybe, maybe not. But does Alabama have any right to complain about being snubbed after losing games to Vanderbilt and Oklahoma? Absolutely not.
