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Nick Saban, wearing a red tie and blazer, made a passionate argument on ESPN around the potential consequences to leaving Alabama, a school that still pays him a half-million annually, out of this year’s 12-team College Football Playoff field.
Saban, who retired in January after 17 seasons and six national championships at Alabama, centered his argument around Alabama’s strength of schedule relative to SMU, the ACC school that earned the final at-large playoff spot over the Crimson Tide. Alabama had a better strength of record (No. 9 to SMU’s No. 15) and strength of schedule (16 to 60) than the Mustangs.
“I think one of the things I’ve mentioned throughout this football season is, if we don’t take strength of schedule into consideration, is there any benefit to scheduling really good teams in the future?” Saban said. “Here at Alabama, we’re supposed to play Notre Dame, Ohio State, Wisconsin, Florida State in the future outside the league. Those are great games for fans to see. That’s what I think we should be doing in college football is creating more good inventory for great games that people are interested in. Do you enhance people wanting to do that? What’s the athletic director going to do? He may cancel all those games now knowing that the SEC is tough enough.”
There’s a fair argument to be made that this selection committee did not value the strength of scheduling nearly as much as it should have. And Saban’s concerns around the committee disincentivizing tough non-conference scheduling are shared by some of college football’s top leaders and one reason why power players would like to see the selection process change as detailed in a CBS Sports story last week.
All of those things can be true but they really don’t apply to…
Source link : https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/nick-sabans-pointed-alabama-quotes-offer-clues-to-future-of-sec-schedule-college-football-playoff-format/
Author : John Talty
Publish date : 2024-12-08 19:29:00
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