First, Florida State quarterback Jordan Travis suffered a season-ending leg injury against North Alabama on November 18. Fast-forward two weeks, and Alabama upset Georgia by three points in the SEC Championship Game.

This set the stage for all hell to break loose when the College Football Selection Committee picked the four teams for the 2023/2024 College Football Playoff last Sunday at noon.

The hell broke loose.

The four teams selected were Michigan, Washington, Texas and Alabama. That’s right, no Georgia. No Florida State. No Ohio State.

How could the committee leave out the Bulldogs, a program that had won two straight national titles and 29 games in a row? Yes, their winning streak was broken, but it happened on a neutral site and to the eighth-ranked team in the nation. Do you mean to tell me that Georgia isn’t one of the nation’s four best college football teams?

How about the Seminoles? They went 12-0 in the regular season and defeated Louisville in the ACC Championship game. The ACC is a Power Five conference. Schools that go undefeated in such conferences shouldn’t be left out of the four-team playoff. Oh, I see, you’re going to say that Travis’s season-ending injury factored into the decision. OK, but aren’t the teams with the best resumes supposed to get in, or is it the programs with the best chance of winning? Who has the authority to make that call if it’s the latter?

What about Ohio State? I mean, you can try and sell me on the weakness of the ACC if you want, but the Big Ten is just below the SEC in terms of conference caliber. The Buckeyes only lost one game all year, and it was by six points on the road at Michigan, the number one seed in the four-team playoff.

Yeah, the last CFP Final Four is a huge mess, but it likely would have been had Georgia, FSU or OSU been included in place of Alabama and Texas.

Did the committee get it wrong this time? Probably, but who am I to say? How can anyone truly make that determination? This is what happens when you not only have people voting on who gets to play for a national championship but they can only pick four of the 133 FBS schools.

The four-team model was never perfect, but it was a helluva lot better than the BCS model that only included two teams.

Also, do you remember the days before the BCS, when it was the Wild West when determining a national champion? You’d often have the top team playing the 15th-ranked team in the Rose Bowl, while the second and third-ranked squads competed in a bowl that didn’t have a conference tie-in. You’d think all the top squad had to do was win its bowl game to claim a very mythical national championship, right? Not necessarily. It was totally up to the voters–sportswriters–to decide.

And they didn’t always go with the top-ranked team going into New Year’s Day.

Things were so much messier back then than they are now.

The Pitt Panthers, a program that hasn’t factored into the national title picture for over 40 years, once went a combined 33-3 between 1979-1981 and never even got to play for a national title, let alone claim a mythical crown.

Back to modern times.

Thankfully, the field expands to 12 teams next year. Will it be better? I think so. For starters, the sixth highest-ranked conference champions will get in. Yes, rankings are determined by voters, but at least winning a conference title will come close to being an automatic bid for a Power Five school–even if it’s not a guarantee.

Even a Group of Five conference champion will have representation in the 12-team field. How do I know that? There are only five Power Five conferences. And who knows? If the committee is feeling frisky, it just might invite a Group of Five champion as an at-large entrant if it’s ranked high enough. Probably not, but one never knows.

There will surely be complaints about schools that are left out of the expanded tournament, but that will always be the case no matter how large the field is–just ask the people who select the 68-team NCAA Men’s Basketball bracket.

We have to face the facts, college football will never get its national title just right. Why? There are too many teams, and if there are too many teams, you have to have selectors, and selectors are human.

Humans can be unpredictable.

The committee may not have gotten its final final four just right, but the games will be fun to watch.

So, unless you’re a Bulldogs, Seminoles or Buckeyes fan, at least you have some great college football to look forward to, right?