College Football Playoff Selection Committee Accused Of 'Manipulation'
12/10/2024 01:42 PM
Joel Klatt believes the College Football Playoff selection committee altered its process to achieve an intended outcome.
Despite losing to Clemson in the ACC Championship Game, SMU received the tournament's final at-large bid over Alabama. The Mustangs begin the CFP as the No. 11 seed over the No. 12 Tigers.
Klatt has previously blasted a "stupid format" that reserves the top four seeds to conference champions. He called it "horrendous" and "atrocious" that Penn State gets SMU in the first round and potentially Boise State in the second after losing the Big Ten Championship Game to Oregon, which awaits the winner of Ohio State and Tennessee as the No. 1 seed.
On his podcast, the FOX Sports broadcaster accused the CFP committee of tweaking its criteria to keep SMU in the field over Alabama.
"I do believe that they manipulated what their process actually is to get SMU in this Playoff," Klatt said. "They put them in at 11, which is one spot higher than the team that actually beat them, which also doesn't make any sense whatsoever. But that's what they gave us. It's an artificial floor. They're pulling the levers of power in order to create something that probably wasn't going to be created if they did it right."
Klatt thinks the committee made rankings that looked "really good in theory" and "played to the masses." He argued that they artificially valued conference championship games because they didn't want to bump SMU from the Playoff.
"I believe they were swayed by sentiment," Klatt said. "I believe they were swayed by the fact that the ACC got absolutely jobbed last year with Florida State being undefeated and left out. And they thought to themselves, 'We can't do that again for the same team that we did it last year in Alabama.'"
Klatt believes the CFP is going down a "precarious road" by preferring the most deserving teams to the best ones.
"The cost of that is put onto the shoulders of the teams that actually earned their way to the top."
Related: Here's The Schedule For The First Round Of The College Football Playoff
