Why the Texas Longhorns don’t deserve the 5 seed in College Football Playoff

If you’re a follower of college football, then you’ve undoubtedly seen the reveal of the first 12-team College Football Playoff that was announced Sunday. While Oklahoma lost those dreams pretty much nine weeks ago, the rival down south was slotted as the 5 seed, where Texas will host the 12th-seeded Clemson Tigers in the first round on Dec. 21 in Austin.

The Longhorns benefitted from a very weak SEC schedule in their debut season, unlike the Sooners, and their best wins came against Texas A&M and Vanderbilt on the road. Their claim to fame this season was losing to Georgia twice and making it to the SEC Conference Championship Game.

However, as FOX college football analyst Joel Klatt pointed out in his weekly podcast, The Joel Klatt Show: A College Football Podcast, the selection committee has intentionally manipulated the seedings to further emphasize the importance of conference championships.

Klatt also mentioned that while that should be an important factor, the imbalanced schedules of these playoff teams aren’t equal, so it shouldn’t be judged in the same way that it had been in the past before conference realignment.

As Klatt alluded to in the podcast, the committee has also in a way devalued conference championships at the same time, by giving the losers of the Big Ten and SEC championship games (see Penn State and Texas) an easier path in the playoff than the actual winners of the games (see Oregon and Georgia).

While college football fans can be excited about the new format and the added meaningful playoff games, there still is room to gripe about the poor job of how this whole thing was seeded.

In no world should a Texas team that luckily dodged many quality SEC opponents in its schedule deserve a path where it plays a Clemson team that snuck in on a 56-yard field goal and a two-loss Arizona State team.

Meanwhile, No. 1 Oregon has to play either No. 8 Ohio State or No. 9 Tennessee, which each have numerous NFL prospects on both sides of the ball. That being said, the games aren’t won on paper and both the Tigers and Sun Devils have talented teams that are more than capable of edging out the Longhorns.

It might sound as if I am a biased Oklahoma fan who doesn’t want to see Texas go far in the playoff, and while that may be true, there’s an across-the-board issue with the College Football Playoff seedings. Still, there's plenty to be excited about with these matchups, and I don’t think I’m the only Oklahoma fan who is ready for the Sooners to be included in the field next year.