It is now April, and Gary Patterson still isn’t over his squad getting left out of the college football playoff. The coach of the TCU Horned Frogs had a few criticisms aimed in the direction of the selection committee months after his team was left on the outside looking in on the first ever college football playoff.
Patterson seems to think that if Texas or Oklahoma were in a similar position his team was in this past fall that they would have been given the benefit of the doubt.
Now, more than four months after the fact, TCU head coach Gary Patterson opened up to reporters about the Frogs’ snub, and surprise! He wasn’t a big fan of how things went down.
“I was told the reason we had a [selection] committee is we were going to take all that stuff out of it. [Conference] championship games shouldn’t have mattered,” Patterson said.
“Their job was to watch all this film and pick the four best teams no matter who you played, what you did. All the sudden it came down to, ‘Well, they played a championship game but they didn’t.’ That’s not what we were told. We were told they were going to pick the four best teams.”
TCU entered the final week of the regular season ranked third in the College Football Playoff rankings, and they went on to beat Iowa State, 55-3, in their final game. It wasn’t the stiffest of competition, but hardly a result that should move them down to sixth afterwards, something Patterson said he actually predicted before the game.
“You can’t say it was the body of work, then … we beat somebody 55-3 and dropped from three to six. That means you studied everybody in the country and the body of work moved us to three. But we won 55-3. The other people’s body of work moved so much that they moved everybody up — and us down — in five days.”
To this point, the selection committee will only start releasing rankings in 2015 on Nov. 3, but there was talk they may not be a weekly occurrence like in 2014, something Patterson agreed with. The decision to move Ohio State ahead of Baylor and TCU wasn’t unreasonable in a vacuum, but moving the Horned Frogs from third down to sixth after a 52-point win looks horrible.
TCU went on to demolish Ole Miss, 42-3, in the Peach Bowl after there were questions whether it would show up to play in its bowl game after missing the playoff. While it’s pretty clear Patterson would have rather TCU have made the field, he thinks maybe the Frogs gained something from it.
“There was that motto out there, if we would have been an Oklahoma and Texas with a larger fan base and sold more T-shirts, that we would have been in the playoffs,” Patterson speculated. “I think we gained more possibly by not being in the playoffs — and how we handled it — than by being in the playoffs.”
I think Patterson makes some valid points about being left out of the playoff. I also think that continuing to talk about it and complain about it makes you come off as being extremely salty.
I personally had TCU making the cut into the final four and there is no doubt some changes need to be made to the selection criteria going forward, but I’m not about to sit here keep complaining about it.