College Football Playoff drama, bad news for SEC headline Week 13 overreactions
Published 25 November 2024
As the college football season winds down, there is really only one thing that we know for sure. No matter how all the various conference races turn out, and no matter what the playoff committee’s final decisions are regarding participants and seeding, not everyone is going to be happy.
Another slew of chaotic results over the weekend produced the usual plethora of snap judgments and quick takes. Once again, our aim here is to attempt to provide some big-picture perspective.
Here are the top five overreactions to a wild Week 13.
Playoff expansion saved college football
On the one hand, we have a lot more teams involved in meaningful games this late in the campaign. The counterargument is maybe that isn’t such a good thing, as this is shaping up to be a year that would have had a fairly clear-cut foursome under the old format. Is more actually better when there might not be 12 teams truly worthy of a shot at a national championship?
It depends upon one’s definition of worthy. We probably won’t be able to give a definitive answer to that until we see how those first-round and quarterfinal games unfold. We do know that a couple of blockbuster showdowns from the past weekend that could have been staged in a playoff setting turned out to be colossal disappointments. But having said that, we’ll try to deal with the worthiness question for the remainder of this piece.
The SEC’s week wasn’t all that bad
Overall, it was probably a net loss of a team from the at-large pool for the league with Alabama and Ole Miss excusing themselves from the discussion. Texas A&M’s status didn’t actually change, as the Aggies almost certainly needed to go the automatic route to a berth, and that path is still available despite the loss at Auburn.
The beneficiary looks like Tennessee, back among of the queue among the league’s at-large hopefuls. The Volunteers were, counterintuitively, both helped and hurt by Alabama’s loss, now unable to reach the SEC title game under any tiebreaker scenario but seemingly well positioned to sit out that week and prepare for a round-of-12 contest. All that goes out the window, of course, should they lose to in-state rival Vanderbilt. As we’ve seen, conference optimization is off the table once competitors take the field.