Kirby Smart pleads for College Football Playoff committee to establish clear criteria

Kirby Smart just wants it straight to point, no questions asked, when it comes to the College Football Playoff.

Clear criteria, strength of schedule, whatever it takes. Right now, in the new 12-team playoff at least, the five highest ranked conference champions make it followed by seven at-large teams.

Clear enough? Not exactly as Smart and others are arguing on both sides of the aisle when it comes to strength of schedule.

“Just, I guess, the happiness of our fans, that’s the incentive, right,” Smart said. “Because fans want you to be in the playoffs, but they sure don’t want you to play cupcakes. They want you to go play quality opponents. I like going to schedule a great team. You want to play somebody in a neutral site game, a kickoff classic. I love all that stuff, so I want to do as much as I can, but we’ll see where all this stuff goes. Guys, I don’t think you can sit here right now and not in the middle of it, but maybe whatever, three quarters way through it and truly judge it. 

“And we all knew when they started this new process, guys. We knew that the argument would be 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, first out, you know? It just seems so much bigger than your first out in basketball, because there’s 64 in and, you know, so like, nobody really cares 65 when it’s 12, 13, 14, it just seems so big, just like the fifth team used to be, but we’ll see what happens.” 

Georgia was ranked 10th in the latest College Football Playoff rankings. If the playoffs started today, Smart and Georgia would be the No. 11 seed based on current criteria and travel to Penn State.

So as he said, there seems to be more chances of “proving it on the field,” but there are bound to be arguments for those final spots.

“I mean, everybody gets a chance to go on the field and play, but they need to really decide what they want, though,” Smart said. “That’s the frustrating thing, because it’s record based, or it’s the quality of opponents, it’s hard to say that you shouldn’t have a strength of schedule factor in there.”

For example, since the five highest ranked conference champions get in, there’s a chance the fifth one could be out of the actual top 12 rankings. If that’s the case, they are automatically in the playoff as the No. 12 seed, as BYU would be currently based on projections.

With that, they bump a team out.

Perhaps Smart and others will see the 12-team playoff play out over the next few weeks and then see it in action this December, for their benefit at least. Or the inevitable expansion to 16 teams might be the solution.