Kirby Smart makes definitive statement on if missing SEC Championship is best path to College Football Playoff

While Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin has come right out and said that some SEC coaches believe playing in the SEC Championship Game would be an unnecessary risk to their College Football Playoff chances, Georgia coach Kirby Smart isn’t even entertaining the thought.

He has no interest in such a hypothetical, however practical it may become for his squad.

“I don’t think that’s a hypothetical that… you know, the focus is on UMass,” Smart said early this week. “I mean it really is. So why would I put energy or time into trying to figure out what the best pathway is, including the SEC Championship, when I’m worried about UMass? I just don’t think it’s a quality conversation.”

It is, however, a conversation that’s going on around the league right now.

With so many log-jammed 8-2 teams, someone is bound to be on the wrong end of things come Selection Sunday. And if there’s a two-loss team competing in the conference championship game, that will come with the risk of losing a third game and potentially falling out of the College Football Playoff mix.

“I’ve talked to other coaches, so I’ll just kind of give you the feeling from some other coaches on that. They don’t want to be in it,” Kiffin said of the SEC title game. “You know, the reward to get a bye [ in the CFP] versus the risk to get knocked out completely. I mean, that’s a that’s a pretty big — that’s a really big risk.”

A big risk indeed.

And the College Football Playoff committee itself has left things rather vague when discussing how conference championship games will be weighted, particularly when it comes to suffering an additional loss.

“We’re going to evaluate the games and how teams play, and the performance on the field,” College Football Playoff selection chair Warde Manuel said. “That’s what the commissioners ask us to do. They didn’t ask us to stop right before the championship game. They asked us to rank teams through the championship games.”

Luckily for viewers in the SEC, there really isn’t a scenario where a team would purposely engineer their results to avoid the SEC title game. Most can’t afford another loss, and if winning out puts you in the title game, so be it.

For now, Kirby Smart isn’t even worried about the potential College Football Playoff implications. It’s simply one game at a time.