Paul Finebaum joins chorus of college football pundits calling for CFP to exclude G5 schools

In its short lifespan, the College Football Playoff has been an excellent metaphor for the way college football’s powerbrokers and narrative drivers make their sausage.

As it’s expanded, the call to shrink the pool of potential entrants has grown louder. Every year, the path gets easier for blue-blood schools, as tweaks to the formula and changes to the process ensure that the most recent snub will never happen again. Regardless of what happened last year, the results observed here and now are the only parameters worth considering when demanding the next round of changes.

The latest narrative push, one that was already gaining traction before this past weekend, is for the CFP to not only limit the number of Group of 5 schools that can make it in a given year, but also ban them outright.

College football pundits and tastemakers like Josh Pate, Joel Klatt, and Nick Saban have been sounding the alarm on schools like Tulane and James Madison making the playoff. That alarm got louder after both schools failed to make things competitive on Saturday. Even the announcers calling Tulane’s game wished Notre Dame had been there instead.

Never mind that Oregon actually got blown out by more points last year than JMU did this year. The outcome of this year’s game was irrefutable proof that the Dukes should never be allowed back in. The many Power Four schools that have been blown out in CFP games will always be welcomed back, of course.

You can add ESPN’s Paul Finebaum to the list of notable college football voices calling for the CFP to tell G5 schools to take a hike. The SEC talking head called for their exclusion during an appearance on First Take on Monday.

“Yes, yes, yes!” said Finebaum when asked if Group of 5 schools should be excluded from the CFP. “We aren’t sitting here trying to say they looked good, because they did. JMU was down 31, Oregon had already left the game, and let them mop up to cover the spread. The games were unwatchable.

“I don’t know many people who want to see these schools in. I am well aware there are arguments like ‘Hey, in the NFL the NFC South winner gets into the playoffs’, but they are professional teams on the same level. JMU and Tulane are the elite of that division, but they’re still not anywhere near on the same page.”

Finebaum said that the goal should be to include the 12 teams with the best chance to win a national title, regardless of who wins conferences or qualifies under the current CFP rules.

“We could go down the list of the SEC and probably find quite a few schools that could beat both with one hand behind their backs,” Finebaum said. “It is just an absolute hypocrisy to have to deal with this every year. This year, there shouldn’t have been two in but the ACC was asleep at the wheel with their tiebreak system.

“I don’t want to be the Grinch who stole Christmas, but get these schools and these conferences out of my way. I want to see the best 12, 16 teams. I don’t want to see them if there are 28.”

The good news for all the complainers is that it is improbable that this season’s scenario will ever happen again. Thanks to changes in the way the CFP measures teams, a likely return to form by the ACC, and a revised agreement with Notre Dame, the chances are low that two G5 schools will make it at the same time. The most likely scenario is that they will eventually be excluded, as college football ultimately favors the powerhouses and brand names.