CHARLOTTE — SMU coach Rhett Lashlee was adamant near the start of his nearly 16-minute press conference following his team’s 34-31 loss to Clemson in the ACC Championship Game that he did not have a message for the College Football Playoff selection committee.
In his own words: “They don’t care what I say.”
Lashlee then made calculated remarks about SMU’s playoff outlook throughout the remainder of his nearly 16-minute press conference.
“I don’t have a message,” Lashlee emphasized.
Followed immediately by:
“It would be criminal if we’re not in. It would be wrong. It would be wrong on so many levels, not just to our team. It would be wrong to what college football stands for — to what it is.”
Maybe that isn’t a direct message, but it does sound like a coach banging the drum for his team as the playoff’s movers and shakers deliberate over what to do with SMU ahead of Sunday’s selection show.
Even Clemson coach Dabo Swinney went to bat for the Mustangs.
“That’s a really, really good football team,” Swinney said. “No way should they be punished. They are every bit of the eighth team in the country tonight. Every bit of it.”
Whatever the College Football Playoff Selection Committee decides could further shake the foundations of a playoff system that has undergone tremendous changes in recent years.
It boils down to a not-so-simple question: does the committee punish SMU for losing by three points on a walk-off field goal after it erased two separate 17-point deficits in a 13th game that almost 90% of FBS teams don’t have to worry about?
“Our team deserves a chance to be in,” Lashlee said. “It doesn’t matter what I say, but it would be incredibly wrong. I think it would be unprecedented. It would set a really bad precedent. It would break all the principles of what we’ve been told.”
We’ve been told the committee will not punish teams that play in conference championship games. Then, after the penultimate College Football Playoff rankings reveal — which saw SMU land at No. 8 — committee chairman Warde Manuel was asked if SMU would drop out of the field entirely with a loss.
“Potentially, yes,” Manuel said.
Thus, the situation that SMU currently finds itself in was born.
On its face, SMU is the model of a modern CFP team. The Mustangs won 11 games and went undefeated in conference play in their first year as a Power Four conference program. Those 11 wins came by an average of 19.4 points per game. Both of their losses were the result of late field goals, and their first loss — in Week 2 against BYU — came before the Mustangs made a permanent quarterback switch to Kevin Jennings.
“If you’re going to take a team that goes 8-0 in a power conference, one of the three best conferences, only two teams did that,” Lashlee said. “We were in. We could have not showed up, and according to what we were told Tuesday night we’d be in. So we showed up and we competed our butts off.”
So why is there so much doubt around the Mustangs? Saturday’s result dropped them to 0-2 against currently ranked teams. SMU’s strength of schedule ranks 60th in the nation, per ESPN’s Football Power Index. For context, that’s just behind the likes of ULM (56) and South Florida (59).
Realistically, SMU will be weighed against a trio of 9-3 SEC teams: Alabama, South Carolina and Ole Miss. Especially the Crimson Tide, who landed at No. 11 — the last at-large bid in the latest set of rankings.
Alabama has three wins against currently ranked teams, including a Georgia squad that beat Texas in the SEC Championship Game moments before SMU kicked off against Clemson. Alabama also has two losses against unranked teams, including a 21-point defeat against an Oklahoma team that finished 2-6 in SEC play.
And those losses cost Alabama a spot in its own conference’s championship game. These are the facts the selection committee must consider when shuffling teams.
So, after a heartbreaking loss on the ACC’s biggest stage, SMU now has to wait over 12 painstaking hours to find out its fate.
“We responded like a championship team,” Lashlee said. “We responded like a team who could get into this 12-team playoff and win four in a row.
“Would love the opportunity to do that.”
