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SMU has made the College Football Playoff, despite losing the ACC championship game, after the selection committee chose the Mustangs (11–2) over Alabama (9–3), which was the first team left out of the bracket.
The Mustangs were ranked 10th and the Crimson Tide 11th.
Clemson (10–3), which beat SMU Saturday night to earn an automatic Playoff berth, is ranked No. 16, but received the No. 12 seed, which pits them against Texas in the first round. SMU earns the No. 11 seed, and will play at Penn State.
SMU’s athletic department raised a school record $159 million ahead of its move to the ACC this season. Influential SMU donor David Miller also said he was able to get $200 million in long-term donation commitments from the school’s richest boosters last summer.
Despite the cash influx, however, SMU fell just short of winning the ACC, and put the CFP committee in a tough position, forced to choose between an Alabama team that played a strong SEC schedule against a team in SMU that went undefeated in the ACC’s regular season, only losing to BYU before Saturday night.
A major talking point this weekend was whether teams like SMU would be penalized for playing in a conference championship game and not coming out on top. “It was quite a debate,” CFP selection committee chairman Warde Manuel said of how to rank SMU and Alabama on ESPN after Sunday’s reveal.
While former Alabama coach Nick Saban, who now works as an analyst for ESPN, said no coach whose team was left out of the Playoff should be complaining, he hopes the CFP’s decision makers can learn from this initial year with 12 teams.
“If we don’t take strength of schedule into consideration, is there any benefit to scheduling really good teams in the future? … That’s what I think we should be doing in college football, is creating more good inventory for great games that people are interested in,” Saban said.
Alabama’s three losses this year came against SEC opponents—Tennessee, Vanderbilt, and Oklahoma. The Crimson Tide’s nonconference games were against Wisconsin, USF, and Western Kentucky.
“There’s no disrespect to Alabama’s strength of schedule,” Manuel said. “It’s merely looking at the entire body of work for both teams.”
