Entering Saturday, the Clemson Tigers had a 37.7 percent chance of making the College Football Playoff. After losing to the South Carolina Gamecocks to finish the regular season as a 9-3 ACC team, though, they saw their odds go UP.
Now, Dabo Swinney’s team has a 42 percent chance of reaching the CFP. How did that happen?
It happened because of the combination of expanded playoffs with auto bids the same year that megaconferences with no divisions and major scheduling imbalances began. All of that catapulted Clemson into the ACC Championship after the Miami Hurricanes lost to the Syracuse Orange Saturday.
Miami finishes 10-2 but has two ACC losses. Clemson is 9-3 but finished 7-1 in the ACC. They will now face the 11-1 SMU Mustangs, and the winner of that game will get an automatic bid to the College Football Playoff. Nobody with a straight face can say that makes sense.
See, the problem is the ACC, like the SEC, has 16 teams with no divisions and an eight-game conference schedule. That imbalance led to Clemson, SMU and Miami, the clear-cut three best teams in the league, not playing each other at all. Clemson just happens to be 9-3 because they played two of the top SEC teams.
When the expanded CFP began, the issue was always that a 9-3 SEC or Big Ten team could sneak in and make a run to the national championship. What nobody saw happening was a 9-3 team from one of the lesser conferences doing it, though, but that’s exactly what’s happening here.
So how can we fix this? There are a few ways.
One way would be to ditch auto-bids altogether. Heck, ditch the conferences at this point, as many teams didn’t even want to play in their conference championship games if they knew they were headed to the CFP. Just put all the top teams in one league and pick the top 12 at the end based on a formula.
Another way is to divide up the conferences a bit more. Separate them into divisions and have leagues within leagues. Eliminating divisions may work with a 12-team league and an eight-game schedule, but once it hits 14 and 16 teams, it’s way too much.
The most likely and final reaction to this, though, could be the SEC and Big Ten breaking off and forming their own league. That may seem ridiculous, but how could anybody justify a potential three-loss ACC team getting a spot over a team from one of those two other leagues, particularly if SMU still gets in despite losing. You can’t.
Simply put, the smaller conferences had better hope and pray SMU wins. If Clemson gets in after going 0-2 vs. the SEC because they “won their conference” despite losing a game in the last week of the season, the SEC outcry will be too large. It’s just another bit of evidence this format is dumb.
