Kirk Herbstreit: College Football Playoff fun killer if he, others, have their way
Where were you when Kirk Herbstreit, the unfortunate voice of college football in this country decided he knew what you wanted?
Where were you when he chose to speak for everybody without consulting anybody, making the case for a still bigger College Football Playoff, locking out every Group of Five — American, Conference USA, Mid-American, Mountain West and Sun Belt — conference program along the way?
Where were you when Herbstreit, believing he couldn’t have sounded more reasonable — like “of course everybody’s with me on this” — made an utter ass of himself and, by extension, tried making one of us, too?
It was a few minutes after we’d learned not only Tulane had reached the 12-team College Football Playoff, but James Madison, too, kicking Notre Dame to the curb, because them’s the rules:
The playoff must include the five highest-ranked conference champions and, because five-loss Duke won the ACC title game, those five champs became Indiana (Big Ten), Georgia (SEC), Texas Tech (Big 12), Tulane (American) and James Madison (Sun Belt).
Nobody’d previously imagined a world in which the ACC champ fell short, yet the Blue Devils lost out of conference to Illinois, Tulane and UConn and them’s the breaks.
Enter Herbstreit.
“We all just want the best teams,” he said.
No, we don’t.
If it’s not four teams — which would have worked just fine: Indiana, Georgia, Texas Tech, Ohio State — but 12, we want some fun, a Cinderella opportunity or two and occasional new faces, not the seven SEC programs commissioner Greg Sankey lobbied for on Saturday and not a system that locks out more than half (69) of the 136 programs — the Group of Five — playing FBS football.
Apply Herbstreit’s logic to the NCAA basketball tournament and we’d lose every automatic qualifier, every 12–4 upset, which happens all the time, and every wacky, crazy, gloriously impossible run to the Final Four, which is what we love most about the tourney to begin with.
Kirk Herbstreit, fun killer.
“We all want the best teams, and however we get there — subjectively, like I said, whether it’s a mixture of committee with computers, Sagarin rankings, whatever it is — just come up with a way to rank them …,” he said. “Whatever the rankings are, spit it out, play it, and we all get what we really want, which is the best teams in.
“If it’s Group of Five, great. If it’s not, too bad. Let’s just rank the teams and play the best teams.”
“If it’s Group of Five, great?”
Is he drunk?
If it’s a simple one through 12, he’s counting every Group of Five program out from the beginning and he knows it.
Because if it’s a simple one through 12, it looks like this:
Indiana (Big Ten)
Ohio State (Big Ten)
Georgia (SEC)
Texas Tech
Oregon (Big Ten)
Ole Miss (SEC)
Texas A&M (SEC)
Oklahoma (SEC)
Alabama (SEC)
Miami (ACC)
Notre Dame (Independent)
BYU (Big 12)
And if it’s a simple one through 16, add:
Texas (SEC)
Vanderbilt (SEC)
Utah (Big 12)
Southern Cal (Big Ten)
Do what Herbstreit wants and you’d need a 20-team playoff to finally include a Group of Five program and not lock out more than half the sport.
Arizona (Big 12)
Michigan (Big Ten)
Virginia (ACC)
Tulane (American)
The great Nick Saban wasn’t much better than Herbie. He understood the rules, regretting them thoroughly.
“You’re going to have two teams in the playoff — no disrespect to the Group of Five — that are nowhere near ranked as high as some other teams that are much better than them,” the old Tide coach said. “And I think that maybe something we can learn from this … [is] a little better criteria for trying to make sure we get the best 12 teams in the playoff.”
“No disrespect?”
Or is it anything to put the Irish in?
“I’m happy for the teams that got in, and I think the committee did a really good job,” Saban said. “I just think there was one team left out that I just don’t think should have been left out some kind of way. But there was no way around it.”
His last sentence was right, there is no way around it. What’s wrong is thinking there ought to be a way around it, all in the name of getting a two-loss Notre Dame into it, an Irish team that lost to Miami and Texas A&M, that beat Southern Cal and Pitt.
Leave it to Mouth of the South Paul Finebaum — sorry, Jimmy Hart — to get it right.
“Shut up already, Notre Dame fans. You haven’t done anything this year,” he said. “You have a really good team. You played two very meaningful games at the beginning of this year — one at home and one on the road — you lost both.
“What’s your best win, Southern Cal? … You’re afraid to play in a conference because you want to take the money and run. That’s your fault.”
The voice of reason.
This time, at least.
What Herbstreit, Saban and Sankey don’t get, other than a 16-team playoff being the worst “solution” for myriad reasons — nobody’d want to play in their conference title game anymore, preferring rest; who knows how many Lane Kiffin situations it would produce; it might kill the bowl system entirely because what’s the point after 16 teams have been subtracted in a transfer-portal world — is their personal dissatisfaction with what the system delivered does not mean the system failed.
Indeed, given their biases, their satisfaction with the final output would be an indictment, not a defense, of said system.
What ESPN needs, given the task of communicating the bracket first and live, is a real journalist or two on the panel, capable of seeing every side, not just their friends, business partners and themselves.
Here’s to the system remaining unchanged.
And, good chance, watching Herbstreit, Saban and Sankey cry about it again next year, too.