College football teams will finally be rewarded for taking the tougher road.
The College Football Playoff Committee announced Thursday that administrators approved a straight-seeding model based off the selection committee's final rankings for the CFP that will start this upcoming season. This eliminates only conference champions being able to get top-4 seeds and first-round byes in the recently expanded 12-team playoff, which should benefit teams like the Oklahoma Sooners who are tasked with enduring the SEC while also taking on big-time nonconference matchups.
CFP seeding change could reward Sooners for surviving SEC chaos
With the new model, the top four teams in the country will earn the top four seeds and first-round byes regardless of where they finished in their conference or if another team from the same conference is also among the top four.
The five highest-ranked conference champions will still be guaranteed a spot in the playoff, just not a top-4 seed.
So if it's clear the SEC has two of the top four teams, one will not be penalized and miss out on a first-round bye just because it came up short in the SEC Championship Game or against a conference opponent earlier in the season and missed the title game completely but had a late run.
Last year, the Texas Longhorns were stuck with the fifth spot behind the likes of Boise State and Arizona State despite losing only to No. 2 Georgia during the season. The Longhorns beat Arizona State in the quarterfinals, but the Sun Devils still got the benefit of extra rest from the first-round bye after winning the Big 12 and losing to two unranked teams during the regular season.
The hated Longhorns are a poor example to use, but they are the latest example of how the old model was actually a disadvantage to teams from the SEC. Teams in the SEC endure the toughest schedules in the country, yet couldn't be rewarded for succeeding throughout a daunting slate unless they won the SEC Championship Game at the end.
The counterargument would be that if a team isn't the best team in its conference, then it's not the best in the country. Last year's CFP result proved that theory wrong. That thinking would also influence more coaches to start thinking like Nebraska's Matt Rhule, who would rather do away with big-time nonconference matchups because there's no point if you're rewarded for your record no matter the strength of schedule.
This obviously wouldn't have helped the Sooners last season, but with nonconference meetings with Michigan, Nebraska and Clemson scheduled for the future on top of an SEC gauntlet, OU could actually be rewarded for being willing to take on a challenge.
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