Bowl scheduling meets adversity much like rest of 2020 season

By TIM GAYLE

Certainly, this year has been the most difficult in the seven-year history of the College Football Playoff selection committee. With different starting dates and conference-only schedules, it was extremely difficult to judge teams the way they had been gauged in the past.

“I would just say that when the year starts out, everybody has the same opportunity to be evaluated,” CFP selection committee chairman Gary Barta said. “There are only four spots, and so those four spots are filled up with the teams who have the strongest strength of schedule, the most wins, appear to be (the best). Alabama was a great example. When you watched Alabama they dominate in every game that they play.

“No matter the name of the school or the name of the conference, the committee watches the games and fills those four spots with what the committee believes are the best four teams in the country.”

Those four teams, according to the committee, were Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Notre Dame. The first two were obvious choices, but was Ohio State, which played just six games, truly deserving? What about Notre Dame, who was thoroughly beaten by Clemson in the conference championship game on Saturday? What about Texas A&M, whose only loss was to Alabama early in the season?

“From the very beginning, within the committee and publicly, we talked about some of the challenges we were going to face in this pandemic season,” Barta said. “One was number of games played. We were trying to compare Ohio State, who went 6-0, to Cincinnati, who went 9-0, to San Jose State, who went 6-0, to Alabama, 10-0, Coastal Carolina, 11-0.

“Putting Ohio State third because of their body of work, because of beating two ranked teams and winning the conference championship, there was strong support and consensus for that. They won their championship … against a ranked team. They had 22 players out with COVID-19. They were not moving the ball through the air, and I give Northwestern a lot of credit for that. But they then found an adjustment and found a way, again, on the ground to win the game. In the end, they won their conference championship and they were undefeated, so they moved into that third spot.”

Both Alabama coach Nick Saban and Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly, when speaking to ESPN, implied that their vote might have gone another direction had they been asked.

“As a football coach, we see it differently than maybe the fan or the media or maybe even athletic directors,” Kelly said. “When you (put together a squad every week with COVID guidelines and restrictions), you just look at it differently. If there were 13 football coaches in that (College Football Playoff committee room), I’m going to tell you that it would be a different decision.

“That’s why you get varying opinions on this relative to the amount of games (teams play) because we just see it from a different perspective. I think we see that games matter, the amount of games that you play certainly do matter because you can be a different team in Week 7, Week 8, Week 9, Week 10, Week 11. There’s different things that come in when you don’t play as many games.”

Saban agreed, using the extraordinary long season as a reason why this Crimson Tide team has become so special to the veteran coach.

“This season has been longer than most,” he said. “We haven’t played any more games, but they’ve been a lot more spread out and, psychologically, that’s what grinds on the players. I don’t think you win 10 games in this season without having some really, really good players. I think that was the big thing about this season, the people who played 10 and 11 games had to survive the grind. And the grind of this season was a whole lot different than any other season.

“That’s why I thought those teams should be rewarded. But I think Ohio State has a great team and they probably deserve to be in the playoff as well based on the quality team they have.”

Once the committee determined the third-best team, Barta said, the next step was determining whether the Fighting Irish would be fourth or replaced in the final group by the Aggies.

“When you look at the full season, you look at the full body of work, the committee looked to the fact that Notre Dame had two wins over ranked teams, that one of those wins was against Clemson, and that Texas A&M had one win over a ranked (Florida) team,” Barta said. “So there was no single factor. This was something that was discussed at great length within the committee and among the committee members, but when it was all said and done, the committee decided that Notre Dame had earned its way to that fourth spot over a very good Texas A&M team.”

One thing that wasn’t a topic of conversation, he added, was who belonged in the top spot.

“From the beginning, looking at Alabama, at their resume, they beat three top 25 teams, they’ve dominated in every game,” Barta said. “Clemson has had a terrific year. That’s why they’re No. 2. But no, the committee has felt strongly throughout the season that Alabama was the No. 1 ranked team.”

Which led the committee to placing Alabama in the semifinal game in Arlington instead of the closer destination in New Orleans.

“If we looked at the four teams, the geography collectively didn’t make a big difference,” Barta said. “But in this case Alabama as the No. 1 seed, because of the fact that there are restrictions in number of tickets, there are 16,000 tickets that are going to be sold in Arlington and 3,000 tickets that are going to be sold in New Orleans.

“Taking everything else into consideration, the committee believed that it gave the opportunity for Alabama families and fans to have more tickets available, and we decided that that was an advantage that Alabama deserved.”

And while the playoff committee determined the four teams for the two semifinal games and helped determine the participants for the New Year’s bowls, the rest of the college bowl lineup, like the season, suffered an unprecedented fate. 

Ten bowls had already opted out of 2020 – although one, the Fenway Bowl, relocated to Alabama and is named the Montgomery Bowl for its one-time appearance in Cramton Bowl on Wednesday – but four more were forced to shut down this season after the scramble for bowl teams came up short.

Probably the most distressing news came from Shreveport, where the Independence Bowl chose Army more than a week ago and just needed to find an opponent, but couldn’t. As the Independence Bowl closed its doors for 2020, it left a 9-2 Army team without a bowl. The Military Bowl offered to take the Black Knights but had the same problem as the Independence Bowl. In addition to those two, the Guaranteed Rate Bowl and the Birmingham Bowl also found themselves locked out of the bowl business.

Others, such as the Armed Forces Bowl, ditched their bowl tie-ins -- in this case, the Pac 12 -- and quickly grabbed Tulsa as an opponent for Mississippi State. The Gasparilla Bowl had similar ideas in snatching up UAB to play South Carolina.

The four bowls left without teams on Sunday joined the RedBox Bowl, Hawaii Bowl, Quick Lane Bowl, Holiday Bowl, Pinstripe Bowl, Las Vegas Bowl, Bahamas Bowl, Sun Bowl and Loa Angeles Bowl as postseason destinations which hope to resume business in 2021.