Paul Finebaum's position on Alabama and the playoff committee is the biggest threat to college football imaginable

In the middle of Penn State’s 38-10 blowout win over SMU, ESPN college football personality Paul Finebaum — the Mouth of the South — posted something to his social platform, X, that was sure to rile up his audience.

“So far,” Finebaum wrote, “the CFP selection committee has given us some blockbusters. Notre Dame lead late over Indiana 27-3 and Penn State just went up on the committee’s final team 28-0 at the half. Take a bow.”

Here’s the Finebaum translator: “Alabama is better than SMU and Indiana and the College Football Playoff Committee did a disservice to the sport, and the fans, by not putting the Crimson Tide into the field. Alabama would have played a much better game than either of those teams. Because you didn’t put Alabama in, these terrible games are your fault.”

That is absolutely asinine.

Finebaum has a southern audience, and he views the sport through the lense of the SEC. It’s the predictable thought process for someone in his position. But the problem is there’s a large population of people in college football who actually believe that to be true. People believe the blowouts we’ve gotten so far on Saturday are a result of College Football Playoff committee incompetence. That these blowouts, somehow, are the committee’s fault.

So if Finebaum is right — and Alabama should have gone instead of SMU and Indiana, teams who earned it on the field — what is his solution to the problem? What does he suggest the CFP committee do? Disregard the results from regular season games and just put Alabama in, no matter what?

That’s the biggest threat imaginable to college football.

We spend a lot of time debating what is right and wrong for this sport. Whether we agree or disagree on topics, most of us can all agree we love this sport and want what’s best for it. That’s why we have impassioned arguments about conference realignment, CFP expansion, NIL, transfers and teams worthy of competing for a national title. It’s all with college football at heart.

But if what Finebaum is suggesting ever got put into action? What if the CFP committee changed how they operate moving forward and just threw in an SEC team over a more deserving team next year because it thinks the SEC team would provide a better game? What if next year Alabama — a team with three losses and two against 6-6 teams — just got put in over SMU?

That would throw us into a world of chaos, one where the results of the regular season quite literally don’t matter. There would be no need to argue about resumes, strength of schedules, conference titles or any other CFP metric. We would be thrust into a reality where we put teams into the CFP based on feeling alone, which would render the results of the regular season games completely useless. You want to talk about ruining the regular season? Make every result in the ACC and Big 12 irrelevant. Make Indiana’s Big Ten resume irrelevant, too.

Then, at that point, what is the point of watching the games? What’s the point of playing them? If Alabama can lose three times — including an embarrassing loss to a bad Oklahoma team in which it looked just as terrible as SMU and Indiana did this weekend — and still make it when there are teams who did better with their schedules, we will officially arrive in Bananaland.

There will be no way to break anything down outside of betting lines and recruiting rankings, the thing the 12-team CFP field was supposed to rescue us from.

This isn’t to say I don’t think Alabama would favor better against Penn State. I actually do believe they have better players than SMU and Indiana. I think they would have fared better. I also think we may have gotten a better game in State College on Saturday. But that can’t matter because we are wrong about what we think all the time. We were wrong about TCU and Michigan two years ago. If there is one Cinderella run every 10 years, that has to be protected. We have to give the SMUs of the world a chance to make a run without disqualifying them prematurely based on our notions, which are often wrong.

We have to protect the regular season and ensure that the results of the games matter — for everyone. We can’t pick and choose which losses are disqualifying and which ones matter based on conference and preconceived notions. We can’t live in a world where the SEC is undefeated in hypothetical games, especially in a season where those big and bad SEC teams have looked pretty terrible at times.

The SEC benefits from playing a tougher schedule. Had Alabama lost only twice, it would have unquestionably been in and SMU would have unquestionably been out. The SEC teams do get treated with more grace because of strength of schedule, whether those fans want to admit it or not. And even with the extra slack, Alabama lost a third time in Norman and cost itself a spot.

That doesn’t mean Alabama isn’t better than SMU. It means Alabama didn’t use its opportunities well enough and thus didn’t deserve to be included. That’s sports. Sometimes the best teams aren’t always the ones who win.

We protect college football by using the metrics and guidelines. We protect college football by respecting the games enough to listen to what they are telling us.

This sport is in the middle of an evolution. Conferences are going to change. The CFP is going to expand. NIL and revenue sharing are going to change the financial implications of how rosters are constructed. It’s in a very volatile position, but college football will survive whatever happens in all of those scenarios. It’s resilient, we love it and can’t help ourselves but watch.

What college can’t survive is an accepted reality where the results of the games don’t matter. There’s a scoreboard and we keep records for a reason. SMU’s games matter just as much as Alabama’s, even if we think Alabama is a better football team with better players.

So save the propaganda, PAWWWL. It would be far more detrimental for the sport that I hope you love as much as I do.