Will College Football Playoff committee drop LSU Tigers out of playoff picture after blowout loss?
The release of the first College Football Playoff poll recently was treated with shock, disdain, and outright anger from many fans across the sport.
Key points
- And the biggest winner might have been the conference's most effective marketer: LSU Tigers head coach Lane Kiffin.
- The committee decided ahead of time that they should be in, so they determined that the SEC Championship Game could only help the winner, and not hurt the loser.
- Then Alabama, the team gifted a spot in the playoff thanks to their conference patch, was obliterated by Indiana 38-3 in the Rose Bowl.
Losses in the SEC simply don't matter as much as they should, a trend that was obvious in 2025 when the Alabama Crimson Tide were blown out by Georgia in the conference championship game and didn't drop a single spot.
They were 0-3 in the College Football Playoff against non-SEC P4 opponents.
Additional details
- These people, and there’s a whole bunch of them, they march out of the tent, and they’re given instructions on what to say," he added.
- SEC teams were shockingly, and consistently overrepresented and overranked, to the point that prominent rival coaches openly speculated about a connection between ESPN, the SEC, and the committee's willingness to abandon any pretense of objectivity.
- TIM BRANDO JOINS DAN DAKICH ON 'DON'T @ ME' TO DISCUSS INDIANA COACH CURT CIGNETTI'S CFP 'BIAS' COMMENTS "SEC gets a lot of love from ESPN and all their writers that they don't technically pay but march to their drum," he said.
- Kiffin has been loudly decrying the conference's move to nine games, correctly realizing that the extra losses, which put the SEC on equal footing with the Big Ten and Big 12, will be tough to overcome when evaluating resumes.
- So two of the top three teams in the SEC, Texas A&M and Alabama, lost their non-SEC playoff games by a combined score of 48-6.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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