Georgia blew out Florida State in the Orange Bowl on Saturday. Back to you, Bob.

I mean, there’s really no reason to analyze that game, right? It looks like the CFP committee got it right when it excluded the Seminoles despite going undefeated and winning the ACC Championship (a Power Five conference, by the way).

Maybe the committee did get it right when it left out Florida State. The Bulldogs, the back-to-back National Champions coming into the 2023 season, were installed as double-digit favorites the second the matchup was announced in early December. But it was perhaps a miscarriage of justice that Georgia was also left out of the four-team playoff. The Bulldogs had won 29 straight games before losing by three points to Alabama in the SEC Championship Game on December 2.

Anywho, the 60-point Georgia win was the largest bowl victory in the history of college football.

If we’re being totally honest, we don’t know what Florida State would have been able to do at full strength. Sadly, it lost Jordan Travis to a season-ending injury late in the year, and that was believed to be a huge factor in leaving Florida State out of the playoff mix. Why put a weakened Seminoles squad in a playoff tournament to determine college football’s national champion? The arguments that erupted after that were whether the four-team field was decided on merit or who had the best chance of winning.

It’s easy in professional sports. There is no such thing as committees deciding anything. The teams decide things on the field, and if they don’t, pre-determined tiebreakers do the work.

Anyway, it was obvious the committee took the latter approach and selected who they thought were the four best teams on paper.

As far as the Seminoles were concerned, their roster got paper-thin soon after what they perceived as a screw-job, and 28 players either opted out, entered the transfer portal or were injured and weren’t going to be available for the Orange Bowl.

That’s why the point spread climbed to 21 points by kickoff.

Would a mostly complete Florida State team have been able to compete with the Bulldogs even without Travis? Let’s put it this way: I doubt the Seminoles would have made bowl history in the deficit department.

Oh well, we never got to find out. We also never got to find out if the reigning ACC Champions could have hung with anyone in the CFP. As I’ve said before, it will be a little easier next year when the CFP expands to 12 teams. It won’t be a perfect system. There will never be a perfect system that determines which teams get to play for college football’s national championship.

But it’s a lot better than it used to be.