Paul Finebaum reacts to SEC not making national championship game

Paul Finebaum was devastated after Friday evening, once it became official that the SEC would be shunned from the College Football Playoff National Championship Game for the second consecutive season.

The Texas Longhorns couldn’t come through for the conference, as Steve Sarkisian’s team fell to Ryan Day’s Ohio State Buckeyes, who will now face the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in the finale. The 12-team, expanded CFP was supposed to be a showcase for the SEC, and it’s burning Finebaum up that the conference couldn’t get the job done during the 2024 iteration.

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“I managed to hear that this morning on a plane from Dallas, sitting with 225 of my closest friends and Ohio State fans,” Finebaum said sarcastically, regarding the SEC not making it to the CFP National Championship Game, via The Matt Barrie Show. “That is significant. Everyone always thinks that those of us that live in SEC country try to hide things like that. Even today, we’re still arguing for Alabama to get it. But that’s a dramatic moment. It’s a seminal moment in time that I didn’t expect, especially with a 12-team Playoff.

“It’s really amazing when you think about [it]. [The last time the SEC didn’t make the national title game] was before [Nick] Saban. Urban Meyer had just arrived at Florida. Les Miles was about to start roaming the sidelines. To think that we’re in that moment is cause for a lot of concern, at least in the southern part of the world.”

All told, Finebaum likely speaks for many SEC fans, who watched their teams disappoint in either missing the CFP entirely, or not going as far as many believed they would. For example, Tennessee and Georgia couldn’t win their contests when the time game, and the team that made it the furthest for the conference is still getting their feet wet inside the SEC in the Longhorns.

Moving forward, Paul Finebaum and many other SEC pundits will be hoping for a bounce back season in 2025. The conference certainly has the talent and the coaching to compete, but it’s just a matter of putting it all together, as well as taking care of business when the lights are the brightest, something they haven’t been able to do over the past two seasons.