ESPN's Paul Finebaum has a college football playoff take that every Tennessee Vols fan will applaud after 2024
The Tennessee Volunteers got a raw deal in 2024, and that's been implicitly acknowledged with a major college football playoff change being implemented for 2025. The College Football Playoff committee will know do away with the top four conference champions automatically getting top four seeds and instead will simply rank them as they did all […]
The Tennessee Volunteers got a raw deal in 2024, and that's been implicitly acknowledged with a major college football playoff change being implemented for 2025.
The College Football Playoff committee will know do away with the top four conference champions automatically getting top four seeds and instead will simply rank them as they did all year. The playoff committee both ranked and seeded teams separately to account for the conference champions being in the top four. Now, you can throw that adjustment out.
That's something that ESPN's Matt Barrie and Paul Finebaum discussed on Sportscenter this week. Barrie mentioned Tennessee as one of the teams who would have benefitted from the new rule in 2025 last season.
"In the new seeding, Texas gets a bye, Tennessee – benefits another SEC team – they would have hosted a playoff game," Barrie said while looking at the altered 2024 rankings using the 2025 format. "So, it's going on your ranking instead of your conference championship victory."
"Of course it makes sense, because we said this countless times on your podcast, Matt, how convoluted the system was, that schools that did not deserve a home first round bye getting one," Finebaum, responded. "Quite frankly there's been a lot of criticism of the SEC and what (SEC Commissioner Greg) Sankey said, but the SEC would have gotten 6 teams in the straight seeding model. "But right now, no matter what the SEC and Big Ten say, the rest of college football is going to come after them because they really are deeply concerned that they are going to be left behind."
Indeed, that seeding tweak is what dramatically altered the Vols' 2024 season in December. Tennessee checked in at 7 in the final CFP rankings but fell to the ninth seed after conference champions ranked lower than them bumped them down two spots.
Instead of a home game at Neyland Stadium against a much more beatable SMU team, the Vols took to the road at eventual national champion Ohio State in frigid temperatures, which resulted in a 42-17 blowout loss. A playoff win, and we're talking about a far different view of the 2024 season and the entire Tennessee program going into 2025, even after the loss of QB Nico Iamaleava to the transfer portal.
It's going to be a steep climb to get back to the playoffs in 2025, but at least Tennessee knows they won't be unfairly docked if they get in the same or similar position this season.
Too bad the powers that be didn't come to the same conclusion last offseason.