Paul Finebaum: Georgia should be ‘outraged’ by No. 12 CFP ranking

If he is, Georgia coach Kirby Smart did not admit it. He was asked about his team dropping nine spots from the first week to the second on the SEC coaches’ teleconference call on Wednesday.

“I don’t have a lot of control over it,” said Smart, who is preparing the Bulldogs for Saturday’s matchup against No. 7 Tennessee at Sanford Stadium (7 p.m., ABC). “I’m so focused on this game that I didn’t really see or hear anything from (Tuesday’s reveal). I really tried to tune all of that out, because the most important thing that we can do is improve, play better and try to play well.”

Having lost to both No. 10 Alabama and No. 11 Ole Miss, Georgia (7-2, 5-2 SEC) being ranked behind those two SEC teams is understandable. Being nine spots behind Texas (8-1, 4-1) makes less sense.

Side-by-side, the metrics don’t justify the disparity in ranking. Georgia’s strength of schedule and strength of record is No. 1 and 3, respectively. Texas is 55 and 10. And, again, the Longhorns lost to Georgia.

Meanwhile, not only do the Longhorns not own a top-25 victory based on the CFP rankings, their best win to date was three weeks ago against Vanderbilt (6-4, 3-3). The committee also took time to laud Texas for how good it looked in its 49-17 victory over Florida this past Saturday. Never mind that the Gators were playing with a transfer quarterback from Yale one week after getting beat up by Georgia and the Longhorns were playing the game off a bye week.

Meanwhile, the CFP’s selection committee long has been accused of SEC bias. No conference has produced more participants (12) -- or national champions (6) -- since the playoff came into existence in 2015. Including Georgia’s back-to-back titles in 2022 and ‘23, the league claimed four in a row before Michigan finally ran one down this past year.

There certainly is no SEC bias this time around. If anything, the committee could be accused of showing some Big Ten favoritism. That conference – which like the SEC expanded this year -- occupies four of the top five spots in the rankings released Tuesday.

Like the comparisons between Texas and Georgia, those rankings don’t stand up to analytics. No. 1 Oregon’s strength of record (SOR) is No. 1, but its strength of schedule (SOS) and power index (PI) numbers of 51 and 7, respectively, both are below the Bulldogs (1, 6)

Likewise, the other Big Ten teams seem to be over-ranked relative to those metrics:

Selection committee chairman Warde Manuel was asked if those metrics were factored in before votes were cast.

“Yeah, but we also factor in wins and losses in terms of who you play and how you play in those particular games,” Manuel said. “A team with a weaker schedule, how they perform against the opponents that they play is an evaluation that takes into consideration strength of schedule. But it also evaluates how you play against those teams that are on your schedule, whether it’s a strong schedule or a weak schedule and the performance of the teams on the field week to week and in totality.”

Manuel’s full-time job is being athletic director at Michigan, a Big Ten school. Nothing about the 13 voting members of the committee would indicate any associative Big Ten leanings. However, there does seem to be a lack of representation from the Southeast geographically.

Virginia Athletic Director Carla Green Williams played basketball at Georgia and was a longtime senior administrator at UGA. Meanwhile, former Missouri head coach Gary Pinkel and Arkansas AD Hunter Yurachek are or have been employed by SEC schools located in the Midwest.

The rest of the voting members are: Chuck Ault, retired Nevada head coach and athletic director; Chet Gladchuk, Navy AD; Jim Grobe, retired Wake Forest football coach; Randall McDaniel, former Arizona State offensive lineman; Mack Rhoades, Baylor AD; Mike Riley, retired Oregon State and Nebraska coach; David Sayler, Miami AD; Will Shields, retired Nebraska and NFL offensive lineman; Kelly Whiteside, USA Today reporter.

Manuel was asked if the committee engages in hypothetical discussions, such as what team it believes would prevail in a neutral-site matchup.

“No,” he said. “(That’s) hard to do. If you look at this season and who some teams have lost to, I don’t think anybody on this call would have predicted some of these teams losing to the teams that they lost to. We have to evaluate based on the performance on the field that we see. We can’t determine who would hypothetically win a game on paper. That’s not any of the things that we do.

“It’s not a part of our protocol to try to predict what would happen in the future. So, we don’t have any conversations about that as it relates to how we rank the teams.”

As the committee demonstrated last year when it dropped undefeated Florida State from its Final Four after the Seminoles lost their starting quarterback, it does take into account injuries. Both Georgia and Tennessee currently are dealing with a lot of those.

The Vols have remained quiet about starting quarterback Nico Iamaleava, who reportedly has been in concussion protocol since the second half of last Saturday’s game against Mississippi State. Likewise, Georgia’s offensive line and backfield has been ravaged by injuries.

Smart admitted injuries – and a lack of overall depth -- have impacted his team’s performance. But he wasn’t ready to enter into a discussion about how that might be reflected in rankings or records.

“I’m not really interested in excuses,” Smart said Wednesday. “I do know that playing on the road in the SEC is one of the hardest things to do. I’ve always said that. Nobody knows this league better than I do. I do know that when you go on the road and play in this league, it’s extremely hard and tough. And we’ve played some really good teams, especially on the road.”