Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian has hit back at Lane Kiffin and the coaches who have bemoaned their team’s absence from the College Football Playoff.
The inaugural edition of the 12-team playoff era has sparked a huge debate over the teams selected, with the first-round matchups failing to deliver competitive games. All four home teams won, with SMU, Indiana, Clemson and Tennessee all beaten with relative ease.
The outcomes only intensified the debate over how teams are selected for the expanded playoff, with many fans and pundits believing three-loss SEC teams Alabama and Ole Miss would have put up a better fight.
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Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin was among the biggest critics of the playoff committee after the first-round games. The 49-year-old took to social media to blast the committee after both Indiana’s loss to Notre Dame and SMU’s blowout defeat against Penn State.
“Really exciting competitive game. Great Job!” Kiffin posted following the Hoosiers’ loss. And during the Mustangs’ beatdown at the hands of the Nittany Lions, Kiffin added: “Way to keep us on the edge of our seats committee… Riveting.”
However, the inconvenient truth for Kiffin and Ole Miss (9-3) is they had a place in the playoff within their grasp, only to suffer upset defeats to Kentucky and Florida. Those defeats ultimately undermined the Rebels’ resume when it came to playoff selection, with an impressive win over No. 2 Georgia outweighed by ugly performances against mediocre teams.
Lane Kiffin made his feelings about the selection committee abundantly clear (
Wes Hale/Getty Images)
That was a fact Longhorns head coach Sarkisian seemed to point out ahead of his team’s Peach Bowl clash with Arizona State in the playoff quarterfinals. When asked for his views on the outcry over playoff selection, the 50-year-old replied: “We got a lot of teams complaining that they didn’t get into the College Football Playoff, but they stubbed their toe at some point along the way as well.”
Sarkisian is not the only notable figure in college football who is sick of the whining by those who missed out on a seat at the playoff table. FOX’s lead analyst Joel Klatt brutally mocked Kiffin after his social media outbursts. Klatt joked: “If your team played half as well as you tweet you would likely be in.”
Kiffin was not the only major SEC figure to bemoan the selection of the playoff teams, with Alabama director of athletics Greg Byrne campaigning on social media for the Crimson Tide to make the cut ahead of the committee’s selections being made.
Once he received the bad news, Byrne posted on X: “Disappointed with the outcome and felt we were one of the 12 best teams in the country. We had an extremely challenging schedule and recognize there were two games [the losses to Vanderbilt and Oklahoma] in particular that we did not perform as well as we should have.”
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