Now that the teams from the Big Ten have won the last two national championships and both conferences supersized before the 2024 season, tensions between the superpowers may be at an all-time high. Both leagues are lobbying for additional at-large bids into the 12-team College Football Playoff, and their best idea for how to do that is to denigrate the other league.
Oregon head coach and former Georgia defensive coordinator Dan Lanning fired one of the most recent shots across the bow after his team’s Week 13 win over then No. 15 USC.
“This conference is a really good conference, it’s competitive,” Lanning said of the Big Ten. “We didn’t play Chattanooga State like some other places, right? We competed. So you know, that being said, it's tough playing nine conference games, it's tough playing in this league. And we got to take advantage, playing a good team today and attacking that."
Lanning’s remarks were in reference to the SEC’s eight-game conference schedule and the league’s tendency to schedule “cupcake” games in the penultimate week of the regular season. Well, after leading his team to a 9-3 finish with a 27-17 win over No. 3 Texas A&M on Saturday night in Austin, Steve Sarkisian shot back, making the best argument he could muster to get his team into the CFP field.
Steve Sarkisian makes the case for Texas to be in the 12-team CFP field
“It'd be a disservice to our sport if this team's not a playoff team when we went and scheduled that non-conference game. Because if we're a 10-2 team, it's not a question, but we were willing to go and play that game. So, is that what college football's about? Don't play anybody and just have a good record, or play the best and put the best teams in the playoff? We're one of the best teams."
The game in question was Texas’s Week 1 trip up to Columbus to play the defending national champion Ohio State Buckeyes. No team has played Ohio State, which has held the No. 1 spot in the rankings since beating the Longhorns 14-7, closer than Texas did to open the year.
The SEC mandates that its programs play at least one non-conference game against a Power 4 opponent, but there’s no mandate that it has to be one of the best teams in the country. That game made for one of the most highly anticipated Week 1 slates in college football history, but it could be costing Texas a spot in the CFP. Had the Longhorns finished 10-2 with wins over Oklahoma, Vanderbilt, and Texas A&M, they would seemingly have a much stronger case to be in the field.
The issue of playing a non-conference game is not that simple, though. Miami played Notre Dame in Week 1, and its win over the Fighting Irish is the only thing keeping the two-loss Hurricanes in the discussion for an at-large bid. It can work both ways, and those games still have value even if it’s potentially keeping Texas out this time around.
The reality is, Ohio State, with its nine-game conference schedule, played Texas and won. Then, it handled its business flawlessly the rest of the way. After the loss, Texas wasn’t nearly as clean. Sark’s team would still be in the CFP field if it had not lost to Florida in The Swamp or gone to overtime with Kentucky and Mississippi State in consecutive weeks.
The Ohio State loss is far from the only thing that may keep the Longhorns out of the at-large discussion.