Joel Klatt reacts to Jordan Travis' tweet after College Football Playoff snub

Fox Sports’ Joel Klatt saw Jordan Travis’ tweet after Florida State’s College Football Playoff snub and agreed with the quarterback.

At 13-0, FSU was left out, the first Power Five champion to be excluded from the four-team playoff. It doesn’t seem fair on the surface, but the committee explained it in the only way they know how: its criteria.

Klatt worked through that in his explanation as to why Florida State was left out, simply because of Travis’ injury.

“I feel terribly for those players at Florida State,” Klatt said on his podcast. “That sucks man. You guys deserve better. There’s not a doubt in my mind. The system is broken and you got put into a position where you became the path of least resistance. And again, that path then immediately becomes vindicated in this day and age of sports gambling, and it’s an excuse. And so, if you’re the committee, that’s your out. Then you go to the criteria and you say to yourself, like, well, does that make sense?” 

Klatt argued the human side of things puts Florida State in with or without Travis. But the actual criteria gave the CFP a chance to keep the team out.

“And so now let’s put up the criteria, because once you start viewing it through this kind of human lens of like, what are you saying no to,” Klatt said. “Then you land on this, you’re like, well, we’ve got this injury, and then you’ve got the criteria and you start walking through the criteria and what do you see? You see the criteria say things like conference championships one, okay great. Yeah strength of schedule, head to head competition … 

“Comparative outcomes for common opponents like the LSU game in there if you want to go there. And then it says, here we go. Other relevant factors such as unavailability of key players and coaches that may have affected a team’s performance during the season. Or likely will affect its postseason performance.” 

That’s the key. That point in the criteria right there directly relates to Travis, fair or unfair. Plus, it’s committee members projecting how the team would fare without its quarterback.

So far, Florida State went 2-0 with two different signal callers.

“I’m gonna read that last line to you again: ‘the unavailability of a key player that could likely or will affect its postseason performance,’” Klatt said. “In the committee’s eye’s, there it is. There’s our out. That’s our out. That’s our path of least resistance. 

“That’s the way that we don’t have to tell the SEC no. That’s the way that we don’t have to tell Texas that their head-to-head win over Alabama didn’t matter. There’s our out and then we could even sell it to Florida State is like we didn’t want to do this. But look, we had to.”