Paul Finebaum believes the Alabama Crimson Tide needs to make the College Football Playoff, despite an embarrassing 28-7 loss to the Georgia Bulldogs in the SEC Championship Game, because the Notre Dame Fighting Irish can't play in a conference championship.
The rules agreed to at the beginning of the season about Notre Dame's unfair built-in advantage are now the reason Alabama needs to make the 12-team field despite three losses. The only three-loss team to ever make the field was the Clemson Tigers, which won the ACC Championship to nab an auto-bid.
“They should be in, but they made it unnecessarily difficult for the committee because of an utterly humiliating performance,” Finebaum told AL.com on Saturday. “They will likely drop to the cut line, but it would be egregious to cost a school a berth in the field because they qualified for the conference game while Notre Dame isn’t even in a conference.
“The win at Georgia over the eventual SEC winner should matter."
Neither the Miami Hurricanes nor the Fighting Irish has a win as good as Alabama's over UGA back in September. Miami's best win was Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish's best win was against the USC Trojans. Finebaum makes a good point there.
Still, the way the last CFP rankings shook out, it's only right that the lazy Notre Dame excuse of being an independent without a conference isn't whipped out because the Bammers are acting like a bunch of sore losers. This is now the second straight year that Alabama fans thought three losses would be good enough.
Alabama has officially lost its status in College Football
There is a lot of coping going on with what the Tide has become. Even if the CFP selection committee shoehorns Alabama into the 12-team field, few take this program seriously as a threat to win it all. Not having tight end Josh Cuevas healthy isn't the difference in winning all the trench battles the Tide lost on Saturday.
UAT AD Greg Byrne admitted that the "Bama Standard" is lower with Kalen DeBoer, but being throttled by the Dawgs in Atlanta really drove that point home.
The SEC is no longer Alabama's to rule over. College Football is no longer the Tide's.