Back in 2016 — an eon ago in college football terms — Alabama and Clemson squared off in the title game of the second College Football Playoff. That national championship game in Arizona was one of those classic big-on-big battles, a heavyweight title fight that was tied at 24-24 early in the fourth quarter. Then Alabama did the unexpected, exploiting a hole in Clemson’s special teams by kicking a surprise onside kick. The Tide recovered the kick, scored, and never trailed again.
Nearly nine years later, Clemson has an opportunity to pull a similar reversal on Alabama this weekend, and just like that night in 2016, nobody saw it coming.
Somehow, 9-3 Clemson, ranked 17th in the CFP bracket and 18th in the AP Top 25, is playing for a conference championship and the right to a guaranteed playoff berth. The Tigers are roughly 2.5-point underdogs to SMU, but that’s irrelevant; as we’ve seen the last few weeks, lines don’t matter a bit after kickoff.
You’re going to hear the words “brand bias” a lot over the next few days, and that’s because the CFP selection committee opted to jump three-loss Alabama over two-loss Miami for, effectively, the final spot in the CFP bracket. Alabama has a history of favorable treatment from the college football elite, most recently last year when the one-loss Tide leaped undefeated Florida State for the final spot in the final four-team playoff. (FSU hasn’t been the same team since, the poor broken Noles.)
Perhaps it’s a long-standing makeup call for denying Alabama deserved acclaim back in the 1960s. (The college football establishment effectively punished the state of Alabama for having a good football team in a racist society.) Or perhaps it’s just that houndstooth-and-Process crimson mist that’s clouding everyone’s vision, regardless of how good this particular lost-to-Vanderbilt squad is.
But it’s not just Alabama who will be eyeing the ACC championship Saturday night. At stake here is the ACC’s entire reputation and the CFP selection committee’s validity. Is a three-loss conference champion the best the ACC can do? Does a three-loss conference champion deserve to leap into the playoff over half a dozen better teams? Does a three-loss SEC team deserve to be in the field over one, and possibly two, two-loss ACC teams?
And then there’s this hypothetical: Should a school — in this case, SMU — be penalized for reaching a championship game and losing? Should Alabama get to hold onto its spot while doing as much to improve its playoff standing this weekend as you are?
Warde Manuel, the CFP selection committee chair and soon to be the most hated man in several states, answered the SMU-over-Bama hypothetical with an ominous dodge: “That is something that we will decide in the room at the conclusion of those games when we evaluate what happens in the championship. I can’t sort of go into the future and tell you exactly how the outcome of that discussion will be. It depends on the outcome of the game and how it’s played and the results themselves.”
Uh oh. There are holes in that statement wide enough to run an elephant through. Manuel later added that, yes, it is possible SMU could fall below Alabama.
So let’s consider the potential “results themselves.” There are four scenarios at play here:
Clemson loses. Or “SMU wins,” however you want to phrase it. The easiest possible outcome for the CFP committee — and Bama too, for that matter. If Clemson loses, that’s it, they’re out of the CFP hunt. There’s no path for a four-loss ACC team to reach the playoffs, not even if Clemson takes SMU to 50 overtimes. Clemson out, Alabama in.
(Side note: The CFP committee made it clear that Miami cannot jump Alabama. “There’s not another datapoint because they’re not playing in the championship games. So we don’t have anything else to add to the evaluation of those teams, so we can’t move them above or below each other.” Make of that what you will.)
Clemson wins by a 7-10 point margin. The Tigers get the ACC’s automatic bid and potentially move ahead of Arizona State and/or Boise State in the final rankings, giving Clemson a first-round bye. With a solid and competent performance, SMU likely clings to the final at-large bid, and Alabama is out.
Clemson barely wins, by a field goal or in overtime. The Tigers get the ACC’s automatic bid, but — depending on what happens elsewhere in the country — likely don’t get the first-round bye, and start the CFP on the road, potentially in Columbus (Ohio State), South Bend (Notre Dame) or Knoxville (Tennessee). A noble effort still gets SMU the last at-large bid over Alabama.
Clemson wins in an absolute blowout. Here we go. It’s unlikely, but imagine the Tigers dropping a 49-3 stomping on the Mustangs in friendly territory. Clemson gets in and likely snags a first-round bye. SMU could fall all the way out of the playoff bracket even though Alabama did exactly nothing to bolster its cause.
So there you go. One game, ripple effects for bids and byes across college football. As is always the case in this sport, chaos abounds. But then, at least we’re not talking about No. 4 vs. No. 5 seeds any more, are we?