While Alabama football head coach Kalen DeBoer’s first recruiting class boasts a large amount of in-state talent, the running back room got even stronger on Wednesday thanks to an out-of-state addition from just under two hours southwest of Tuscaloosa.

Quitman High School (Mississippi) product Akylin Dear officially signed with the Crimson Tide during Wednesday’s early signing period. His original commitment to the program came back on Aug. 20. Dear broke out as a sophomore in 2022, eventually committing to Ole Miss this past March.

Both Ole Miss and Mississippi State had offers out to the blue-chip prospect, as did Southern Miss. There was some continuity for Dear on the Alabama staff despite the coaching change from former coach Nick Saban to DeBoer in mid-January. Crimson Tide running backs coach Robert Gillespie stayed on in Tuscaloosa as part of the new staff. When the tailback decommitted from Ole Miss on June 28, Alabama again sought to land him.

Dear, who’s 6’1″ and 200 pounds, has both size and speed that can translate to high-major college football. In addition to his Magnolia State offers, he was offered by other SEC institutions including (but not limited to) Texas, Texas A&M, South Carolina and Tennessee. He ran for more than 2,000 yards as a junior in 2023. Alabama’s current running back room is fairly crowded, as both feature backs this season (Justice Haynes and Jam Miller) maintain college eligibility beyond 2024. The position also includes the likes of Richard Young and Daniel Hill, both of whom have seen playing time this fall.

Stay locked in to Alabama Crimson Tide on SI for all things Bama news, and check out the Alabama football recruiting tracker to keep up with the 2025 class and more.

The College Football Playoff committee publicly lists only four specific criteria it uses to rank teams. That list includes strength of schedule and head-to-head competition.  

But a fifth unwritten nugget has become apparent throughout the playoff’s existence: Alabama always, always, always will receive the benefit of the doubt.

You didn’t really think the committee would embrace Miami, Mississippi or South Carolina over Alabama for the final spot in this 12-team bracket, did you? That Script “A” casts a spell on the committee. The Alabama brand endures, even after it loses 24-3 to an opponent that finished 6-6.

Of course Alabama would become the first three-loss team admitted into the 12-team playoff. Who else would it be?

Mississippi, with its lavish history that includes never appearing in the SEC championship game? Not when a storied blue blood like Alabama shares Ole Miss’ 9-3 record.

Sorry, Rebels, you looked awfully good smashing Georgia and South Carolina. And you do use the script font on your helmets, but there’s no “A” in Ole Miss.

Just last year, the committee chose 12-1 Alabama over 13-0 Florida State. That became the only time an undefeated Power Four champion got left out of the four-team playoff.

And in 2017, Alabama joined Ohio State as the only teams from a conference to ever qualify for the playoff without winning their division. That Alabama squad went on to win the national championship, giving future CFP committees permission to keep awarding the Tide the benefit of the doubt.

This latest feat would be the Tide’s most impressive, reaching the playoff despite losing to two 6-6 teams, one of which is Vanderbilt.

ACC title game still matters to CFP bracket

Alabama hasn’t quite pulled this off. The committee, during Tuesday’s rankings update, slotted the Tide to the 11 seed, earmarking for Alabama the final at-large spot. The ink is not dry.

The committee could redirect that final at-large bid to SMU or Boise State if either loses its conference championship game to bid-stealing Clemson or UNLV, respectively.

SMU ranks three spots ahead of Alabama; Boise State sits one spot ahead of the Tide.

SMU or Boise State can only really feel safe, though, if they win their conference crowns and capture the accompanying auto bids. Forget the rankings: Do you really trust that if SMU loses to Clemson in the ACC championship game, the committee would favor the Mustangs over Alabama?

Can’t you just hear CFP committee chairman Warde Manuel explaining the group’s pick of Alabama over SMU? While the committee respects SMU’s 11 victories, let’s not forget that just a few weeks ago, Alabama destroyed Mercer.

Alabama getting playoff bid wouldn’t be like last season’s farce

A year ago, Alabama farcically qualified over Florida State, the ACC’s undefeated champion, because the Seminoles’ quarterback got hurt, and the committee’s crystal ball said FSU wouldn’t hold up in the playoff without its quarterback, even though it had just beaten Florida on the road without its quarterback.  

In contrast, this is no farce. It’s just a show of Alabama getting the crimson rose to emerge from a bubble full of flawed résumés.

Legitimate reasons exist to anoint Alabama as the least-bad choice. Listen to Manuel spell out the rationale for putting Alabama ahead of 10-2 Miami.

“Alabama is 3-1 against current top-25 teams, and Miami is 0-1,” Manuel explained on ESPN. “Alabama is 6-1 against teams above .500, and Miami is 4-2.”

Can’t argue that. Alabama wouldn’t be a good choice, because no good choice exists. Miami would be a worse choice. Alabama’s strength of schedule outranks that of Miami and Ole Miss, the two teams directly behind Alabama in the rankings.

The Rebels lost on their home field to Kentucky, the SEC’s second-worst team, and Miami lacks a signature victory. That’s the thing about expanding the playoff from four to 12 teams. The more teams you add, the worse an at-large playoff résumé looks, and the better a 9-3 blue blood looks.

Of the mangled collection of bubble teams, I would have chosen Ole Miss, by virtue of its dominant victories against Georgia and South Carolina. No playoff team would want to play the Rebels when they’re at their best, but they had their chances, and they blew enough of them, so dry your tears.

How about another 9-3 team, South Carolina? Well, the Gamecocks lost to Alabama and got blown out by Ole Miss, so forget that.

Last year, the committee snubbed a deserving, undefeated team. This year, it’s difficult to vigorously argue that anyone is truly getting snubbed, in the purest sense of the word.

Anyway, you had to see this coming.

Although you won’t find it listed in the CFP rules, because it’s unwritten, by now we all understand: If the committee can find any reason to select Alabama, it will.

Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network’s national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer. Subscribe to read all of his columns.

Clemson Tigers head coach Dabo Swinney often waxes poetic about his time as a former walk-on turned national champion with his alma mater, the Alabama Crimson Tide. It’s a rags-to-riches story that is a good reminder of what is still possible with a little hard work and a few good breaks going your way.

Going into the ACC championship game on Saturday night against the SMU Mustangs, however, Swinney has a chance to repay his former program by doing the funniest thing possible: send the Tide packing from the College Football Playoff and cause an already existing crisis of confidence in his league to spiral even further.

That’s how things are set up on conference title game weekend in the aftermath of the CFP selection committee’s penultimate set of rankings. As much as fans may have wanted to zero in on potential hosts for those opening-round playoff games or see if that Boise State Broncos bus can drive itself all the way to a first-round bye, the real inflection point was really a narrow band of two bubble teams where the debate this season comes down to. 

That would be No. 11 Alabama vs. the No. 12 Miami Hurricanes for the last spot in the bracket. One team left for dead just a few weeks ago is in. The team most assumed was safely in, all of seven days ago, appears down and out for the count. 

“Look, both of them are very good,” committee chairman and Michigan Wolverines athletic director Warde Manuel said in explaining the ordering of the pair. “The committee ranked Alabama one ahead of Miami, but it doesn’t diminish how we see Miami, even with the last three weeks where they have two losses. We still think Miami is a very strong team.

“It came down to a difference in their body of work as we evaluated Alabama and Miami, not just wins, not just losses, but the totality of the season and how those teams performed.”

In the 12-team CFP era, the four-seed versus the five-seed is a non-debate—last year’s controversy surrounding the Florida State Seminoles is a thing of the past. With expansion bringing clear guidelines surrounding how teams will stack up against each other and how they’re seeded, the first team out versus the last one in is where all the debate is rooted. This is where the committee is supposed to earn their nonexistent pay. 

If you were to ask those in the ACC, well, you’d probably get a response that those committee members voting on teams are not even worth that kind of paycheck at the moment. Conference commissioner Jim Phillips sent out a tersely worded statement all but pleading the same case.

“Miami absolutely deserves better from the committee,” the statement said, in part. “As we look ahead to the final rankings, we hope the committee will reconsider and put a deserving Miami in the field.”

Will they, though? As things stand now, that looks more like wishful thinking as opposed to the reality of the playoff field until Saturday’s results crystallizes it for good.

The Hurricanes have one of the best offenses in the country and are led by a dynamic, Heisman Trophy–candidate quarterback in Cam Ward. The only two blemishes on their resume are a pair of losses on the road by a combined nine points—to the Syracuse Orange and a Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets squad that just pushed the No. 5 Georgia Bulldogs to eight overtimes. They had a quality, albeit not top 25, win over the Florida Gators in the Swamp and thumped the South Florida Bulls that the Tide struggled to put away for three quarters. They beat a nine-win Duke Blue Devils side and won a shootout over a solid Louisville Cardinals team, too. 

“Miami, up until the last three weeks, they’ve had a very good season. But they’ve lost two of the last three weeks,” Manuel said. “Miami, top offense in the country with 44 points and over 500 yards per game. So it’s really close. It’s not just one data point over the other.”

Meanwhile, the Tide may no longer have Nick Saban as their head coach but the brand bias may take a few years to fully filter out of the system. The committee seems to define them only with regard to their high ceiling as opposed to the glaringly obvious low floor that has shown up in three losses in conference play. 

Alabama is 3–1 against top-25 teams (wins against Georgia, the No. 19 Missouri Tigers and No. 14 South Carolina Gamecocks balanced out by a loss at the No. 7 Tennessee Volunteers). The Tide also have some inexplicable losses, all on the road, to the Vanderbilt Commodores and Oklahoma Sooners. Falling by a touchdown to the Vols at Neyland Stadium isn’t terrible, but it is one more in the loss column than Miami has overall. 

There’s little doubt the Tide have played a more challenging slate, but they’ve also lost to the dregs of their schedule. It says more about the November chaos that has subsumed the sport that Kalen DeBoer’s team is even in the field as opposed to sitting Selection Sunday firmly out. Such is the playoff picture at the moment, where you have to squint to make out the positives for teams down the rankings and find your reading glasses to parse the negatives. 

Then, there’s lil’ ol’ Clemson lurking around, seemingly waiting just for this moment to ruin their national rival from recent playoff runs in Alabama and conference mate Miami.  

The Tigers lost to South Carolina, but have the committee sitting on pins and needles this weekend as they backed into the game in Charlotte against SMU. Swinney’s side hasn’t beaten anybody of note (zero top-25 wins) and lost to the three teams with a pulse on their schedule (34–3 to Georgia in the opener, 17–14 to the Gamecocks and 33–21 to Louisville). They ate up a mediocre middle class in the ACC, but find themselves as the great beneficiaries of the new system: win your (Power 4) conference championship and you’re in the field. 

To borrow a March Madness term, the first bid thief in the playoff era is set to be Clemson if it can do what no ACC team has done so far and beat the Mustangs.

It might give new meaning to Swinney’s catchphrase: “Bring your own guts.” It certainly is going to cause some queasy ones in Grapevine, Texas, as the committee debates where in the field to put ACC champion Clemson, should the Tigers win, and what might happen to SMU. 

“Potentially, yes,” Manuel said when asked if SMU could drop behind Alabama. “And they can move above teams, as well. Again, it just depends on the outcome of the game.”

Spare a penny for those around Phillips on Saturday night should that scenario come to fruition. It’s bad enough his league is being sued by Clemson, imagine how he’ll feel handing over a trophy that may well cost the conference yet another spot in the playoff, too? 

If there’s any solace to those in Charlotte, at least a Tigers win will also render the Alabama discussion moot. 

Funny how things could work out. Something says the committee won’t be chuckling when they have to cast their final votes in the end, though.