Tennessee is in the expanded 12-team College Football Playoffs coming in as the No. 9 seed with a first round matchup at eight-seed Ohio State.
Despite three teams making the playoffs and earning worse seeds than Tennessee, there’s no doubt that the Vols have the hardest draw in the entire field.
They go on the road to face Ohio State, perhaps the most talented team in the country, in the first game. If they make it past the Buckeyes, the committee rewarded Tennessee with a matchup against No. 1 Oregon in the Rose Bowl. If Tennessee found a way to upset the top two teams in the Big 10, they’ll likely face Texas in the semifinals.
In my admittedly subjective opinion, Oregon, Georgia, Texas and Ohio State are the four best teams in the country in some order. The Vols have three of those teams on their side of the bracket and will possibly have to beat all four of them to win the National Championship.
There’s no debate that Tennessee got the short end of the stick with its draw. But did the College Football Playoff committee screw Tennessee?
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Not in my opinion. Ohio State’s resume isn’t significantly better than Tennessee’s but it is definitely better than Tennessee’s resume. There’s a very fair argument to be made that Tennessee should be ranked higher than Penn State.
But the playoff committee did not punish a single team that lost in a conference championship game on Saturday. Given the message that would send, it is difficult to blame the committee.
The College Football Playoff format that gives the four highest rated conference champions byes is what screwed Tennessee.
The five highest ranked conference champions getting automatic bids is completely fair, but No. 9 Boise State and No. 12 Arizona State getting byes is madness.
What would the playoffs look like without the automatic byes? Tennessee would be the No. 7 seed and would host No. 10 SMU in the first round of the playoffs with the winner getting Georgia in the quarterfinals. The three other first round matchups would be No. 9 Boise State at No. 8 Indiana, No. 12 Clemson at No. 5 Notre Dame and No. 11 Arizona State at No. 6 Ohio State. Oregon, Georgia, Texas and Penn State would receive the four byes.
The playoff format is likely changing again in just two years and that’s good for everyone involved. Unfortunately for this Tennessee team, that will not change its extremely difficult draw.
3 Responses
I love my Vols and yes their potential path here sucks, but this type of headline is just filler and talk more than anything. There’s no such thing as a perfect system to rate/rank/seed college football, or really any sport that doesn’t rely on everyone playing each other through the season. Complaining about the path they have from here instead of talking about the accomplishment of being in the Playoffs (even a more watered down 12 team playoff) is an attempt to get the clicks. More boring to talk about that type of thing, more sexy and popular to put in your headline the system is flawed even though everyone knows it is and every other possible system to replace is flawed too. NONE of this would have mattered if Tennessee had taken care of the lesser Arkansas. They lost to a legit team better than them in Georgia but if we hadn’t crapped the bed in Fayetteville this ridiculous headline wouldn’t exist anyways
That’s why the buckeye lost to an unranked Michigan. Cause they are one of the top 4 teams in the country. Jeezus.
The flaw is in the rankings, period! Right now, we have entire conferences of over-ranked teams playing nothing but overranked teams. In one conference there are three teams that could half-ass compete in the SEC. So, they only have a chance of losing one, maybe two games, each. Now, they are all overrated and in the playoffs. The worst SEC schools are on par with everyone else’s average to top schools. Oregon, Penn, and Ohio would all stand a 50/50 chance against Vandy.
“Not in my opinion. Ohio State’s resume isn’t significantly better than Tennessee’s but it is definitely better than Tennessee’s resume”- says the biased idiot. Ohio played one real game, and lost.