Well, that was disappointing. I take the point that there were blowouts even in the old four-team format and that other sports end up with mismatches in their playoffs — a wild card or a dubious winner of a weak division plays an exceptionally good winner of strong division—but it was pretty obvious that Indiana and SMU didn’t belong and were unlikely to be competitive. So, it proved.

Heck, if it had been up to me and I had the power to exclude an ACC champion, I wouldn’t even have let in Clemson, which lost to Georgia (no dishonor in that), Louisville, and South Carolina, while barely beating SMU, who wasn’t very good (see above).

And don’t get me started on the Boise State bye.

Defenders of this year’s selections will say “the regular season should matter,” and, yeah, it should. The fact of the matter is that if
SMU or Clemson played in the SEC, they’d probably have been four- or five-loss teams. Indiana plays in a real football conference, but happened through the luck of the schedule to play no one who was any good, except Ohio State, who wiped them out. If the regular season matters, strength of schedule should matter.

It’s not as though any of the teams that were excluded were likely to be national champions, so it probably doesn’t make a huge difference at the end of the day. Still, it was a dismal first round, and predictably so.