Four teams, one champion and an infinite amount of opinions on how it should all go down.
At last week’s Southeastern Conference Media Days, coaches were asked about everything from freshman expectations to the Penn State scandal.
But no question was more popular to ask than those about the impending college football playoff system in 2014, with the main concern among SEC coaches being whether or not the four teams should be decided by conference champions.
“There will be a fifth or sixth team that gets left out of it that will complain,” said Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze. “I do believe it’s going to get it right 90 percent of the time. In those four teams you’re going to find probably the best team that’s playing the best at that point in the year.
The NCAA has committed to a four-team playoff system to decide the national champion, but no decision has been made on how the teams will be decided.
“I think that they’ll find people from backgrounds that are not conference driven,” said LSU coach Les Miles. “Even if they were conference driven, they’re just so tremendously loyal to the SEC, they would vote for the best teams, period. Same thing if they were Big Ten proponents or PAC-12, whatever. The point is that the person on the committee have integrity and be able to go beyond what would be natural conference allegiance.”
In what many considered to be a major flaw in the system, Nick Saban’s Alabama team won the 2012 BCS National Championship at the hands of an LSU team that not only beat the Crimson Tide in the regular season, but went on to win the conference.
Saban took a stand at the Media Days in favor of the top four teams format that would award bids to the best four teams in the nation regardless of conference standing.
“You don’t have to win your conference championship to get in the basketball Final Four,” Saban said. “I mean, you got to play your way into it. Whether you win a conference championship or not, if you’ve played and you’re ranked in the top four teams in the country, you ought to have the opportunity to play in the game.”
Saban went as far as to say anyone who disagreed with this format was an enemy of the SEC.
“I think, to be quite honest with you, whoever’s making the statements about conference champions is really making a statement against the SEC and against any league who has more than one good team who would qualify, trying to enhance the opportunity for somebody from their league to get in,” Saban said.
Contact Mike Gegenheimer at [email protected].