Alabama HC Kalen DeBoer minces no words amid outrage on new CFP seeding

Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer - still upset about how the 2024 college football playoff turned out - spoke about the changes coming to the format. The 2024 season marked the first year of the new 12-team playoff, where the five highest-ranked conference champions were guaranteed a spot and the top four conference champions got a first-round bye.

This rule helped teams like SMU gain entry while excluding teams like Alabama. Alabama finished the season 9-3 with all three losses coming in hard SEC contests, against Vanderbilt, Tennessee and Oklahoma. Even though Alabama was ranked No. 11, just behind SMU, and played the 20th-toughest schedule in the country (per ESPN), they were left out of the playoff.

Kalen DeBoer was asked about it at the SEC spring meetings in Destin.

“You wonder what would have happened if other people would have played our schedule,” DeBoer said.

Per On3, Warde Manuel - head of the CFP committee - explained that SMU gained an edge due to their defeats to ranked teams while Alabama lost to unranked ones, which turned out to be a critical element in the final decision.

After Thursday’s unanimous vote by all 10 conferences and Notre Dame to adopt a straight seeding structure, starting this upcoming season, the top four ranked teams, no matter if they’re conference champions or not, will get first-round byes.

The five highest-ranked conference champs will still make the playoffs, but they won’t automatically get a top-four seed. The new format looks to reward the best overall teams, not just those who win their conferences.

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Greg Sankey on if he was surprised that Kalen DeBoer's Alabama was left out of 2024 CFP

During the spring meetings, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey also touched upon the CFP process, raising concerns about how the committee evaluates the strength of a schedule.

“I don’t know that I’d say surprised. I think that’s one of the realities," Sankey said when asked whether he was surprised that Kalen DeBoer's 9-3 Alabama team was left out of last year’s playoff. "But I spoke in July on media days how a 9-3 team, and I used Georgia as a really good example given their three really difficult road games [in 2024], how do you evaluate that against other teams that don’t come anywhere close to that?

“And I said, we learned something the first time through and that raises the need for deeper analysis and understanding. If we’re just going to incentivize wins, playing fewer winning teams can get you to more wins. I don’t think that’s great for football.”

It will become clear in time whether the new format benefits the Crimson Tide.