Casagrande: The CFP committee got it right. Alabama’s better

This is an opinion column.

It was brutal.

Arguably unfair.

The College Football Playoff selection committee practically wore the executioner’s hood Sunday morning because they knew they had to kill the dreams of one very deserving playoff candidate.

They’d crush either Florida State or Alabama — teams that were no-brainers any other year in this playoff era.

Someone was gonna be justifiably outraged.

A precedent was going to fall when Henry the 8th made his move.

And the committee got it right. Alabama’s simply the better team.

Harsh, but ultimately correct with the full beauty of college football’s imperfect system on display in its rawest form.

Florida State was understandably stunned, then outraged. The video of the Seminoles learning the news from the ESPN broadcast was uncomfortable at best. Gutting, if we’re being honest.

The Seminoles are the undefeated champion of the ACC and no unbeaten Power 5 champ had ever come close to missing the four-team field.

That’s what makes this so cruel while also correct. It’s probably why CFP selection committee chair Boo Corrigan looked like he’d just seen a ghost while appearing on ESPN just minutes after the bracket was revealed.

It came down to the committee deciding who deserved to go versus who the best teams were.

Florida State deserved to make the playoff. It isn’t one of the four best teams.

Alabama is.

Watch the Crimson Tide’s 27-24 win over previously-unquestioned No. 1 Georgia before viewing FSU’s 16-6 tickle fight with Louisville and the argument for the ‘Noles went to the guillotine.

Alabama’s playing like a team that will contend for the national title. Florida State would have been TCU 2.0 had it been rewarded for its achievements.

But the truth is Alabama had three wins over the CFP top 13. FSU had one. They shared the honor of beating No. 13 LSU while the Tide took down Georgia (now No. 6) and No. 11 Ole Miss.

And there’s the Jordan Travis aspect that clearly weighed heavily. The one-time Heisman candidate’s broken leg in the North Alabama win changed everything in the committee’s mind.

“Florida State is a different team than they were the first 11 weeks,” Corrigan said in that immediate interview on ESPN. “… If you look at who they are as a team, right now, without Jordan Travis, without the offensive dynamic that he brings, they are a different team. And the committee voted Alabama 4 and Florida State 5.”

The human side of this gets even more painful when you consider Travis’ face in the moment of the announcement and the statement he released in the immediate aftermath.

“I wish my leg broke earlier in the season so y’all could see this team is much more than the quarterback,” is one of the saddest sentences an athlete can write.

The internet outrage was immediate and from all over the spectrum. FSU had multi-paragraph statements of condemnation within minutes. Congressmen were taking swings at the NCAA.

None of them were unjustified in their anger.

These circumstances were just that far off the script. I mean, the Pac-12 hasn’t been part of the conversation since 2016 so the fact they returned to the equation threw things into a scramble mode. One-loss teams like Texas and Alabama kept hanging around, surviving countless elimination scenarios that could’ve turned the final committee meeting into a cocktail party.

Instead, all the worst-case scenarios stacked one by one.

The committee stared down its most difficult decision in the finale of the four-team format.

Someone was going to get screwed.

The easy way out was to put the undefeated conference champ in the playoff.

Instead, they got it right.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.