Stop telling half of college football they don’t belong

As the resident Group of Five guy at Awful Announcing, I see it as my civic duty to stand up for my fellow underdogs. I’m a Temple Owl. I know what it’s like to root for a program that gets dismissed before kickoff. So when I watch the annual November ritual of college football’s gatekeepers explaining why half of FBS doesn’t deserve a shot at the playoff, I take it personally.

These past few weeks have been particularly grating.

Paul Finebaum went on First Take and called the Group of Five “Triple-A baseball” with “no business playing” in the playoff. Will Compton and Taylor Lewan spent a segment of Bussin’ with the Boys explaining why G5 teams need to go 12-0 just to earn the right to get destroyed, with Lewan comparing a Group of Five playoff appearance to “putting that goat on the stand with the Jurassic Park, with the T-Rex, that goes and all of a sudden he gets his ass f*cking murdered.”

I’m sick of it. The rest of the college football media is starting to get sick of it, too.

The whole point of expanding the playoff to 12 teams was to settle these debates on the field. We were told for years that a four-team playoff was perfect, that expansion would water down the product, that we couldn’t let in teams that didn’t deserve it. Then it finally expanded, and the same people who fought against it are now arguing we shouldn’t actually include half of the FBS.

The benefits of including the Group of 5 far outweigh the risk of a potential blowout, as Auerbach pointed out. Why would you tell half the sport it can’t ever access the big postseason event everyone cares about? You can’t have it both ways.

Take South Florida as Exhibit A of how this plays out.

The Bulls started the season 6-1, beat No. 13 Florida at The Swamp on a walk-off field goal, and beat Boise State, last year’s Group of Five playoff representative. They were averaging 42.0 points per game, fifth in FBS. Finebaum went on First Take and dismissed them anyway, essentially saying they may as well be the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp playing the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Then South Florida lost to Navy, and suddenly the narrative became “see, we told you they didn’t belong.” But that’s not how any of this works. South Florida losing to Navy doesn’t prove that Group of Five teams should be excluded from the playoff. It demonstrates that college football teams sometimes lose games, which we already knew, since three-loss SEC teams are still in the playoff conversation.

The College Football Playoff committee dropped its third rankings this week, and Tulane came in at No. 24, the only Group of Five team in the top 25. The Green Wave are 8-2 with wins over two Power 4 opponents in Northwestern and Duke, plus a quality win over Memphis. James Madison, sitting at 9-1 with one loss and dominating the Sun Belt, didn’t crack the rankings at all. Committee chair Hunter Yurachek explained that the strength of schedule was the main differentiator. Tulane played three Power 4 opponents. James Madison played one, Louisville, and lost 28-14.

On the surface, that sounds reasonable. But here’s where the strength-of-schedule argument gets weaponized: Group of Five teams don’t control who wants to schedule them. When you’re Temple or Tulane or James Madison, you can’t just call up Ohio State and get them to agree to a home-and-home. You take the Power 4 games you can get, and you hope those teams are actually good when you play them.

James Madison’s problem isn’t that they didn’t try to schedule tough. It’s that they’re being penalized for not having access to the same scheduling opportunities that Power 4 teams enjoy by default. Meanwhile, three-loss SEC teams are being held up as playoff-worthy because they played a gauntlet of conference games, never mind that they lost three of them. The committee is essentially saying you need a tougher schedule to get in, but also, we’re not going to give you credit for dominating the schedule you do have. And by the way, teams from other conferences can lose more games than you and still get in because their bad losses count less than your lack of good wins.

The blowout argument is just as hollow. Lewan said on BTWB that he’d change his mind if a Group of 5 team got into the playoff and lost by a field goal or less than a touchdown.

“However, you’ve got to be 12-0 and be dominating these lesser-than teams if you think you’re going to be walking into SEC, Big Ten, hell even the Big 12 country, and be able to play competitively against these guys,” he said.

But the 12-seed is supposed to be the underdog. That’s the entire point of seeding. Last year’s first round saw Tennessee lose to Ohio State 42-17. Was anyone wringing their hands about how Tennessee didn’t belong? Or were we just acknowledging that playoff games sometimes get lopsided when elite teams show up? Lower seeds lose playoff games all the time. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

And let’s be honest about how this plays out: if James Madison gets in as the 12-seed and loses to Texas Tech by 30, the same people who are concerned-trolling about blowouts right now will point to it as proof they never should have been there. If JMU keeps it close and loses by a field goal, those same people will say, “Well, they still lost, so my point stands.”

Lewan, to his credit, said he’d “bend the knee,” but others will move the goalposts. It’s just how this works.

College football is the only sport where a significant portion of the media and fanbase(s) actively campaign to exclude teams based on conference affiliation rather than what they did on the field.

The expanded playoff was supposed to give more teams a chance to compete for a National Championship. Instead, it’s becoming a platform for the same people who ran the BCS era to argue that winning doesn’t actually matter as much as conference affiliation and perception. Three-loss teams are being discussed as legitimate playoff contenders while two-loss conference champions from lesser conferences are dismissed out of hand. Strength of schedule is weaponized against teams that don’t control their own scheduling opportunities. The transitive property suddenly matters when it helps SEC teams, but doesn’t matter when it hurts them.

James Madison is 9-1 and has clinched the Sun Belt East. Tulane is 8-2 and has beaten two Power 4 opponents. These aren’t charity cases. These are teams that have won their games and earned their rankings. But we’re supposed to believe that a hypothetical three-loss SEC team would be more deserving because they have better recruiting classes? Because they lost to better teams? Because Paul Finebaum says so?

The College Football Playoff was supposed to settle these debates on the field. Let’s actually do that. Put the Group of 5 champion in the playoff, seed them appropriately, and see what happens. If they lose badly, fine — most 12-seeds do. If they win or play competitively, then maybe we can finally stop pretending that conference affiliation is a proxy for quality. Either we believe in deciding championships on the field, or we don’t. And if we don’t, let’s just be honest and create an SEC-Big Ten invitational and stop pretending this is about merit.