Kevin Jairaj – USA TODAY Sports
The Baylor Bears are coming off a phenomenal 2014 season that saw them finish the regular season 11-1 with a second straight Big 12 title. But despite their resume, the Bears failed to qualify for the inaugural College Football Playoff, losing out to the eventual champion Ohio State Buckeyes for the No. 4 spot in the final rankings and sending the Bears to the Cotton Bowl instead.
Head coach Art Briles has continued to speak out against the decision long after the bowl season has ended, refusing to let it go even as it stands to negatively impact his team moving forward.
Briles has never been a man to shy away from his feelings. Over the years, that has made him a favorite for reporters to cover because he’s never going to give the “safe” answer when something is bothering him. It made him a bit of a folk hero earlier this season in the leadup to the final College Football Playoff rankings when his Baylor team appeared stuck behind the TCU Horned Frogs and Ohio State. But as Briles continues to talk about how his team got robbed, his antics are beginning to border on the obsessive.
The day after the final rankings were released, Briles suggested that there was some regional bias against Baylor and the entire Big 12 (which was the only Power 5 conference to not qualify for the College Football Playoff) and that the committee needed “people that are associated with the south part of the United States.” He also had choice words for his conference commissioner, Bob Bowlsby, who decided not to back “One True Champion” as the Big 12 motto had been all season and named TCU and Baylor co-champions of the conference. It was seen as an attempt to hedge his bets and try and sneak two teams into the playoff but ultimately may have cost his conference a chance to play for the national title.
At the time, Briles had a pretty good point. When you stacked Baylor’s resume against the other teams in the conversation, they had a very strong case to make. The Bears ranked No.1 in the nation in both total offense and scoring offense in the 2014 season and had the most impressive victory of the bunch when they rallied to knock off TCU, also in the mix for a playoff spot, in a wild 61-58 shootout in Waco. Heading into the final vote, TCU had risen all the way to No. 3 in the CFP rankings, making the win all the more impressive (and the fact that Baylor was ranked behind them all the more frustrating for Briles).
Ultimately, the committee chose to go with Ohio State, who demolished the Wisconsin Badgers in the Big Ten Championship to end the season strong. Baylor’s road loss to the West Virginia Mountaineers (7-6 on the year) ultimately was the weight around their neck that the committee claims sunk their chances at being considered one of the top four teams (a fair point) and the Big 12 was forced to sit at home and watch the College Football Playoff, much to Briles’ thinly-veiled chagrin.
But while fans around the country agreed with Briles at the time and pointed out the need for an expanded playoff (already), his support faded pretty quickly. The attention span of college football fans tends to be pretty short, so they quickly shifted their attention towards bowl season and the impending playoff. Briles, however, continued to fixate on his team not making it, perhaps contributing to his team’s narrow 42-41 loss to the Michigan State Spartans in the Cotton Bowl (a talented Spartans team also contributed, of course).
And just hours after Baylor lost against Michigan State, Ohio State (49-37 winners over Michigan State on November 8) dispatched the then-No. 1 Alabama Crimson Tide 42-35 in the College Football Playoff Semifinal at the Sugar Bowl. If that wasn’t enough to quiet criticism of their inclusion in the playoff, Ohio State then went out the next week and dispatched the then-No. 2 Oregon Ducks 42-20 to win the College Football Playoff National Championship.
For most people, that settled whether or not Ohio State deserved to be considered one of the top four teams in the nation. Not only were they one of the best, but they proved on the field that they were in fact THE best for the 2014 season. There could be no more debating their inclusion.
Unless you were Briles, of course.
Last week, Briles continued to talk about Baylor not making the playoff, saying that “a source” told him the Bears missed the No. 4 spot by an “8-to-4 vote” despite nobody asking him about the playoff. This sounds like a bit of a conspiracy when you hear CFP executive Bill Hanstock explain that an 8-4 vote “would not be possible” due to the method the committee uses to rank teams and the fact that the vote is taken via secret computer ballot.
But even if someone did come to Briles and tell him that his team just missed the playoff by a narrow vote, one has to ask: Who cares? What’s done is done and Briles continuing to dwell on it will do his team no favors as they try and make it into the 2015 College Football Playoff conversation.
Let’s make no mistake about it; Baylor has a team that could very easily be in the mix to win it all next season. They have now won back-to-back Big 12 titles and return 17 starters for next season. But when people, and the selection committee in particular, look at this Baylor program, that’s not what they see. Instead, they see a team that collapsed in the bowl game against the Spartans and has been sucking on sour grapes since the final rankings were released. In theory, Baylor should be in the conversation for a preseason top-five ranking but instead Briles is dominating the headlines with his constant talk about why his team should have made the playoff this season.
Meanwhile, Gary Patterson and TCU have quietly emerged as the face of the Big 12 heading into next season. They were the only program in the conference to truly look like a playoff worthy team after dismantling the Ole Miss Rebels 42-3 in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl. And while Briles and Baylor continue to moan and groan about how they were done wrong, the Horned Frogs have let their play on the field do the talking. And at this point, it’s being a lot more convincing than Briles’ sound bites.
If the Baylor coach doesn’t drop his obsession about getting “snubbed” this season, it will keep Baylor from being a legitimate contender for the Big 12 title next season and earning a spot in the College Football Playoff. Nobody is going to roll over for Baylor next season and they will need to put their best foot forward if they hope to be in the mix for 2015.
The competition in the Big 12 will be stiffer than it was in 2014 with many programs looking to be on the rise in a hurry (TCU) and some other traditional powers looking poised to regain their form (i.e., Oklahoma Sooners and Texas Longhorns). If Baylor continues to allow what happened the previous December to impact their preparations in August and September, then the Bears won’t have to worry about the selection committee keeping them out of the playoffs next season because their losses will do it for them.
And if Baylor once again finds themselves right on the edge of the playoff conversation like they were in 2014, this crusade of Briles could be used against them. While in a perfect world, the selection committee would be able to distance themselves from the emotions of college football, they are still human. If they have to choose between Briles, who can’t stop telling everyone what a terrible job he thinks the committee is doing, and somebody else, don’t you think they’re going to lean with the team whose coach hasn’t been a jerk?
Everyone wants their team to get a fair shot at a national championship when they deserve it. The problem that college football has is how do you determine who deserves it when you have over 100 teams vying for the title? The College Football Playoff is certainly not a perfect system but it is a better system than what we have had in the past and it is a step in the right direction, without a doubt. Even so, not everyone with a case to make for being the best team in the nation will get a chance to prove it on the field.
Baylor got the short end of the stick in 2014 when it came to the College Football Playoff selection and the frustration that Art Briles has felt over it was completely understandable. The Bears had a great 2014 season and could have very easily been considered one of the top four teams at the end of the regular season.
But the simple fact of the matter is that they weren’t selected for the final four. More over, the team that passed them to get that No. 4 spot went on to win the national title. So for at least this season, the system is vindicated and they can be confident that they made the right call. For the sake of Baylor’s fortunes in 2015, Briles needs to make peace with that and find a way to move on.
We get it, Coach Briles. You don’t like the decision of the committee. Now get over it.
You can follow Tyler Brett on Twitter @ATylerBrett, on Facebook and on Google.
