BY EDDIE PELLS
Alabama is forcing the committee that will set the College Football Playoff bracket to revisit an old question: Should a 12-team tournament to determine the national champion include a program with three losses?
And Duke is bringing up a new head-scratcher that nobody really thought of before: Could a team possibly make the playoff with five?
Those two mysteries were the main ones left after a day of shuffling in the conference title games set the stakes for Sunday’s big reveal.
Alabama’s 28-7 loss to CFP No. 3 Georgia and unranked Duke’s 27-20 win in overtime over CFP No. 16 Virginia were the key results Saturday — leaving the selection committee to sleep on which three teams out of five contenders vying for the final spots in the bracket are worthy, and which two stay home.
No. 9 Alabama (10-3), No. 10 Notre Dame (10-2) and No. 12 Miami (10-2) are in the hunt for two of those spots.
No. 25 James Madison (12-1) and Duke (8-5) — unranked but the newly crowned champion of the Atlantic Coast Conference — are the candidates for the other.
The wacky ACC
Normally, the sports world doesn’t start paying attention to Duke until hoops season reaches full swing. Maybe someone among the ever-present throng of Duke haters on social media would title this one: “Blue Devils ruin football, too!”
Duke’s win gives the ACC a champion with five losses, which places the conference on the cusp of not placing a single team into the tournament.
Blue Devils coach Manny Diaz is more than fine with comparing his team to James Madison.
“They don’t have a win like this. They don’t have a win against a team like that. That’s a big-time team right there in Virginia,” he said. “Seven wins in this conference? Seven Power Four wins compared to zero? No, that’s a playoff team. These guys deserve to be in.”
It is true that Duke’s strength of schedule is about 50 spots higher than James Madison’s. But in most of the rest of the metrics — including that all-important loss column — the Dukes of James Madison look much stronger than Duke.
This is how the ACC got into this pickle:
— No. 20 Tulane won the American Conference.
— The No. 25 Dukes won the Sun Belt.
— The unranked Blue Devils beat Virginia.
CFP rules call for the five best-ranked conference titlists to earn automatic spots in the 12-team bracket. Four of those spots, or so the thinking went, were supposed to go to the Power Four conferences. But that’s not what the rules say, and so, it comes down to whether the committee ranks Duke ahead of James Madison to keep the unthinkable from happening.
Lopsided loss makes Alabama less than a lock
Because two teams from outside the top 25 won their conferences and will receive automatic bids, it means the top 10 teams — not 12 — from Sunday’s rankings will make the playoffs.
Heading into Saturday, one thought was that the committee placed Alabama at No. 9 last week, flip-flopping it with Notre Dame, so that if the Crimson Tide lost, there would still be room to slip them into the playoff, even with that 10-3 record.
The ugliness of Saturday’s loss — a 21-point beatdown that looked worse at times — might change that calculus.
Crimson Tide coach Kalen DeBoer is leaning on the idea that a team shouldn’t be penalized for playing in its conference title game.
“How that can can hurt you and keep you out of the playoff?” he said.
Last year, Alabama was the odd man out after being idle on championship Saturday, but watching SMU slide in ahead of it after — what else? — a loss in its conference title game. But that loss was close. Alabama’s wasn’t.
Notre Dame and Miami, which were idle Saturday, are looking at other things.
Irish coach Marcus Freeman is leaning on the argument that the real comparison should be between his team and Alabama — not between Notre Dame and BYU or Notre Dame and Miami. He wants nothing to do with that Miami comparison, because the Irish lost to the Hurricanes in Week 1.
Committee chair Hunter Yurachek has been opaque, at best, about how the committee judges that result.
One possibility Sunday is that, thanks to No. 11 BYU’s lopsided loss to Texas Tech, Notre Dame and Miami could be scrunched right next to each other in the rankings. That, some believe, would make it almost impossible to ignore the head-to-head matchup.
That’s what Miami coach Mario Cristobal is banking on.
“Same record. Identical metrics and then, again, Miami beats Notre Dame,” he said.
Best of the rest equals best of the best
The game pitting the two best teams in the country didn’t have much impact on anything regarding playoff seeding.
No. 2 Indiana beat No. 1 Ohio State 13-10 in a thrilling, defensive slugfest that will make the Hoosiers — yes, the Indiana Hoosiers — the top team in the country heading into the playoff.
All the discourse about Alabama and the meaning of title games aside, it would be hard to see Ohio State dropping below the No. 4 spot and forfeiting the first-round bye that goes to the top four.
Maybe the committee places the Buckeyes at 2 or 3 to at least keep alive the tantalizing prospect of a rematch in the national final on Jan. 19.
