Florida State was snubbed in 2023, but maybe Alabama wasn’t the problem

Unbiased Playoff Selection Day - 2023

The 2023 season was the dream scenario for the final season of a 4 team tournament. 3 of 5 P5 conference champions were undefeated, and of the two that each had one loss, Texas beat Alabama head to head. You would think that the committee had a cut and dry assignment and there would be no surprises on selection day.

There was a problem though. Multiple depending on who you talked to. For one, Alabama was left out, and many people clinging to the idea of the ‘best’ teams going to the tournament thought that excluding the SEC champion was unacceptable. Additionally, FSU looked flat in the ACCCG without Jordan Travis - people were wondering if they were still the same team that ran the table in the ACC and beat LSU early on.

Anyone taking the time to read an article like this knows what happened next. FSU was left out, and Alabama was given an invite amid a storm of angry non-SEC fans shouting about blatant bias.

Every college football fan has an opinion about that decision - Bama or FSU. But what’s the consensus? Well if you use the results from the ‘unbiased ranking quiz’, the answer is… both?

Using the rankings that were derived from the results of that quiz, Washington was the team that got in unfairly. Here’s our top 5 with the scores that contributed.

The narrative around FSU’s exclusion was all about their star quarterback. Luckily, there was a question in the quiz that basically asked about this situation, and there’s a metric that at least somewhat reflects that sentiment - the overall talent composite.

For FSU to drop out of the top 4, their talent score would need to fall to .35, which would put them on par with Northern Illinois in that metric. No shade to the Huskies but I’d probably put the team with 10 future NFL players above them on this particular scale.

Let’s back up though. How did their resumes compare after championship weekend?

Obviously both teams were undefeated P4 conference champions, so record alone won’t tell us much. We have to figure out which of those W13 streaks was more impressive. A typical starting point might look at each teams best ranked wins:

4-3, Washington wins? I’d say that they definitely take the ‘prestigious win’ category, but what if you look at all opponents instead of the set that the committee puts a number next to?

Switching back to the quiz results since they rank every team, you end up with an average P5 opponent ranking of 57 for FSU and 54 for Washington. Washington still on top, but barely. Let’s dig a little deeper and look at how decisive those wins were for each side. Florida State beat their P5 opponents by an average of 16 points, where Washington bested their unlucky foes by only 10. That means that every week, FSU was winning their games by almost a full touchdown more than Washington.

So FSU played a very similar overall slate of opponents and beat them by many more points. According to the criteria weights derived from the quiz, that should have been enough to consider them the more deserving team. If you want to factor in the not-so-quantifiable quarterback issue, you have to factor it in quite heavily to overcome this argument. Afterall, I didn't even get into the fact that Texas also scored lower than FSU.

There’s no going back now. FSU went on to get absolutely mollywhopped by the “University” of Georgia in a game that they didn’t feel like they should have been in, and Washington’s impressive run fell one game short of glory. Were we robbed of a Brock Glenn Cindarella story? And if so, was it big bad Alabama that we should blame? Or the much more likeable Huskies from the west coast?

Agree or disagree, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Use the rankings from the quiz as a starting point if you’d like, and tell me if you think any of my criteria weights don’t vibe with the quiz results.