Snubbed: Florida State and the College Football Playoff Controversy

December 17, 2023

College football has experienced a lot of drama over the past few week. The first weekend of December was Conference Championship weekend, where the top teams in every conference faced off against each other to be the last one standing at the top of their conference. For all the major Power 5 conferences – the ACC, SEC, Big-12, Big-10, and PAC-12 – there were major implications for the four-team Playoff for the national championship. There were seven teams in contention for the top four spots: the Georgia Bulldogs, Michigan Wolverines, Washington Huskies, Florida State Seminoles, Oregon Ducks, Texas Longhorns, and Alabama Crimson Tide – with them ranked in that order going into the weekend. In its final year of the four-team format, the race to the College Football Playoff was the most competitive it had ever been, with no team having anything more than one loss and four teams going into the weekend undefeated. As it usually does in the world of college football, chaos ensued. With Washington beating Oregon, Alabama beating Georgia, Texas winning, Michigan winning, and Florida State winning, the committee now had a difficult decision to make: three undefeated teams and three deserving one-loss teams vying for only four Playoff spots – meaning that two good teams would have to be passed on. Come the end of Conference Championship Weekend, the College Football Playoff Committee announced the four teams that would be participating: Michigan, Washington, Texas, and Alabama, meaning undefeated Florida State was snubbed out.

At least one school from the SEC has been in the Playoff ever since the inception of the four-team Playoff. This means that if a school were . . .