This 2025 Alabama team doesn’t deserve a College Football Playoff spot
By David Wasson
Published:
College football is a beauty pageant. Always has been and always will be, since the first-generation bowl games communicated by telegraph to the modern-day version delivered to 100-inch TVs and all of our smartphones.
And because college football is a beauty pageant, the winner will always have an element of subjectivity to it. From sportswriters and coaches polls to the BCS Championship Game to the 4-team College Football Playoff to the current 12-team CFP iteration, deciding who is the best has only morphed into who gets in to play for who is the best.
Like we said, a beauty pageant. And because the subjectivity of it all forces us to use all of our senses to determine who belongs “in” and who should be consigned “out” of the Playoffs, I am supremely confident in making this declaration:
Alabama doesn’t deserve to be in.
No sir, not this Alabama team. Not after Saturday’s 28-7 beatdown by the Georgia Bulldogs. Not after bookend losses that showed us as much about Alabama’s bona fides as the 10 games that came between them. Not with more deserving teams around the country ready to play with more intensity, fight and acumen than the Crimson Tide could muster in Atlanta.
Look, I get the argument for Alabama. I truly do. Heck, I could probably articulate it for Crimson Tide Nation better than they can as their hangover from Saturday’s drubbing fades away. Alabama won 4 straight games against ranked teams in the middle of the season, the first time any team had ever done that without a bye week sprinkled in. Alabama went to Athens and beat the future SEC champions on their home soil. Alabama stared at the demon from 2024, mighty Vanderbilt, and took down Diego Pavia and Co.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That argument is fine and good, until the fine folks in Tallahassee pipe up to remind everyone that Alabama rolled into the season opener against Florida State and promptly got smacked around 31-17 by a team that then went on to finish 5-7.
That argument is fine and good, until the fine folks in Norman pipe up to remind everyone that Oklahoma rolled into Bryant-Denny Stadium and played a winning game of smoke and mirrors en route to a 23-21 victory to snap Alabama’s 8-game winning streak.
And that argument is fine and good, until the fine folks on the Plains pipe up to remind everyone that the Crimson Tide was very much on the ropes again to yet another medicore Auburn team before pulling out a 27-20 victory in the Iron Bowl.
Which brought us to Saturday, an Alabama team puffed up with faux hope and reflected promise of championship teams past facing a Georgia team that had also smoke-and-mirrored its way to a win or 2 in 2025 but was also fully ready to unleash pain upon the Tide.
That pain was delivered for the full 60 minutes. Alabama was missing injured running back Jam Miller, sure, but even with Miller it wouldn’t have been able to do much better on the ground than a historically low minus-5 net rushing yards.
Quarterback Ty Simpson spent the entire afternoon underthrowing and overthrowing receivers so much that he might just have to return to Tuscaloosa next season instead of head to the NFL as it looked back in October.
Georgia’s Gunner Stockton was surgical in slicing Alabama’s defense in a 20-of-26 effort with 3 touchdown passes. And the Tide defense, which stayed on the field for almost 37 minutes due to its offense’s ineptitude, allowed Georgia to committee up 141 rushing yards.
Listen, y’all. There is no perfect system to decide who should play for the national championship. There is truly no objective way to decide between teams that play in vastly different conferences against vastly different strengths of schedule and have such varying outcomes.
This isn’t the NFL with 32 teams, set divisions and schedules. This is college football, with hundreds of teams and everyone out here just playing whomever they want.
And because of those facts, the beauty that is this imperfect beauty pageant now not only has a nation sounding off on social media saying Alabama doesn’t belong but also has a group of oldsters in a conference room outside Dallas determining that fate as you read these words.
Which of the so-called bubble teams – Notre Dame, Miami, BYU, Texas and Vanderbilt – that get into the 12-team CFP field is an entirely different debate with entirely different data points and metrics and measurables that can and will make your head spin.
Incidentally, one of the supposed tenets of these imperfect rankings is that a team isn’t supposed to be penalized for its performance in a postseason game. To which I reply, simply, does a winning Playoff team get credited for a good performance?
I thought so.
So as you prepare to hunker down for a 3-hour (!!!) television extravaganza Sunday to find out which 12 teams made it to the beauty pageant finals, just know this… Alabama’s loss Saturday was just too ugly, a performance akin to tripping on their evening gown or bumbling through the interview segment, to deserve to be in.
An APSE national award-winning writer and editor, David Wasson has almost four decades of experience in the print journalism business in Florida and Alabama. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and several national magazines and websites. He also hosts Gulfshore Sports with David Wasson, weekdays from 3-5 pm across Southwest Florida and on FoxSportsFM.com. His Twitter handle: @JustDWasson.
