Almost as soon as the 12-team College Football Playoff bracket was released, and that took almost a half-hour as ESPN did its best to build suspense, talk quickly turned to the deserving teams left out.
Former Alabama coach Nick Saban was the first to note that the playoff didn’t include the 12 best teams, that schools like Notre Dame, Vanderbilt and Texas are vastly superior to Group of 5 conference champions Tulane of the AAC and James Madison of the Sun Belt.
(JMU got the nod over ACC champion Duke for the final automatic bid because it was ranked higher by the committee.)
Get ready for this to be a major talking point if No. 11 Tulane and No. 12 James Madison aren’t competitive in their opening-round games against No. 6 Ole Miss and No. 7 Texas A&M, respectively. The opening betting lines suggest those contests will be blowouts — Tulane and James Madison are both three-score underdogs. Last year, the one Group of 5 team in the playoff was Boise State, and it was crushed by Penn State.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
