Six times in the past a team went undefeated and not made the college playoffs. The Florida Seminals have gone 13-0 and should have had a lock in the CFP. The Seminals lost their starting quarterback Jordan Travis with two games left in their season, while looked at as a huge loss FSU pulled through and won their last two games against the Florida Gators and the Pittsburgh Panthers.
This will be Alabama’s eighth time making the CFP in the last 10 years, this recent qualification will be seen as fraudulent concidering they had a loss on their record. The “Crimson Tide” lost to the Texas Longhorns, who are also in the tournament. Texas is the three seed, while Washington and Michigan are seeds two and one respectively.
While FSU is in the less competitive ACC, and Alabama is in the very competitive SEC. This could be another reason for why they missed the playoffs, although these are valid reasons, FSU should not be looked at as a bad team just because of the conference that they are in and the loss of their quarterback. Due to this setback, the team’s fate was uncertain when it came to their playoff chances. However the FSU backup was put in and played very solid for the last two games of the season, he threw for 217 yards his first game starting along with two touchdown passes. The following game he threw for 134 yards securing the win against the Florida Gators despite throwing no touchdown’s and obtaining an unfortunate injury late in the game.
Even if Roadmaker was healthy in time for a game in the CFB playoffs, there is no telling if it could have been of equal quality to his performances in the prior games. While FSU will ultimately see this as a loss, they can still fight for fifth place against Georgia who lost their last game of the season to Alabama.
Alabama could potentially put up a better fight than FSU in the CFB playoffs, and they beat No.1 ranked Georgia. The loss on their record is one of the only reasons why they look out of place in the playoffs, the game that they did lose was against No.4 ranked Texas who, in that game, had an amazing fourth quarter performance scoring 21 points and winning. This match-up happened in week two of CFB, Alabama went on to win the rest of their season while Texas lost to No.12 ranked Oklahoma.
Alabama and Texas made the playoffs over FSU, but it makes sense. These teams are both in very competitive conferences of their own and could potentially stand a better chance against Michigan and Washington compared to Florida State. As unfortunate as it is for FSU, Alabama and Texas would put up a better fight against the other playoff teams, while this is in large part due to injuries the rankings also come into play and the fact is that Alabam has beaten twice the amount of ranked teams than FSU and that could also be a large part of the seminoles not making the playoffs.
