Do the Big 12 and Pac-12 deserve Kirk Herbstreit’s criticism stemming from TCU’s performance?

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Watching the championship game on Monday, it was obvious around 5:02 a.m. PT that TCU was not on the same field as Georgia.

I mean, how could they have been? The Bulldogs came “hunting” and we all heard that pre-game audio clip of Kirby Smart, as well as the fact that he somehow convinced his team that they were underdogs. Needless to say, this was Georgia’s game to lose and they just didn’t, taking a 31-point lead in the first half. However, something that has now caught on and stood out from the game is broadcaster Kirk Herbstreit’s comments.

As he and play-by-play announcer Chris Fowler looked for anything and everything to talk about in a game that was clearly over midway through the second quarter, Herbstreit piled on TCU’s huge loss. by calling the Big 12 and the Pac-12. The two conferences that have had the least success in the college football playoffs, as TCU was the first Big 12 team to win a game and the Pac-12 has had only two reps since the playoffs began, with a winner a semi-final match.

Herbstreit gave in to what I consider to be the worst part of every playoff, which is when the college football world immediately starts wondering if a team deserves to be there when he said:

“Sometimes you get into those games and the Big 12 — and the Pac-12, to some extent) — you think about that playoff era,” Herbstreit said. “A lot of times they’ve been criticized for whether or not they deserved a chance. Oklahoma had a few chances in the past. And when they came in, it didn’t always go well. And now you get TCU, and now they’re down 52 to 7. So sometimes you just don’t represent yourself. It creates a narrative there, doesn’t it, because “The SEC is so much more powerful and look at this that happens to TCU and the Big 12.'”

While Monday was far from TCU’s best showing, looking at it from a much broader landscape, they beat the Big Ten champion who also beat Ohio State. I’m not saying TCU beat Ohio State because we don’t know because they didn’t face each other, but they faced off with the team that many thought had the best chance of beating Georgia and knocked them out. It’s simply a fact, and while Michigan fans claim they should have taken the beating, they couldn’t even beat a conference team they now denigrate.

While I understand that two SEC teams in Alabama Georgia have always dominated and are vying for a championship seemingly every year, it doesn’t seem fair to me to downgrade the Big 12 and Pac-12 programs. The 2017 drought for the Pac-12 and winless streak for the Big 12 don’t sit well with many, but both conferences as a whole are getting as strong as they’ve ever been, even with the programs leaving. . Evidence of that would be great, but the college football world is doing exactly what it’s prone to do, overreacting without looking at the landscape.

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For starters, it would have taken an absolutely perfect performance from TCU to beat a Georgia team that we’ve known all season was the best team in college football. They strangled Oregon Week 1, they easily beat No. 1 Tennessee and they beat LSU which was a team that beat Alabama, by 20. We also know now that we’re good in the era of the playoffs that the key to winning from a recruiting point of view is to have a ton of blue-chipers on the roster. TCU has outdone this season on the court after winning five games a year ago, but it’s already paid off as they just introduced their all-time best recruiting class.

Georgia’s roster consisted of 77% top-notch players otherwise known as four-star and five-star alumni. According to 247Sports, dating back to 2012, the national champion has had at least 52% of his roster made up of four- or five-star rookies. Ahead of the season, 247Sports released a graph showing which teams reached the premier line, meaning which teams could actually win the championship.

Now, looking at the roster, five of the 15 teams finished below .500, with three of them being SEC teams. Halfway through the season, we knew six of them hadn’t even had a chance to make the playoffs, and of those six, two were from the SEC or the Big Ten. Not to mention that TCU is nowhere on this list and was able to win the championship. I think the main part of Herbstreit’s argument that I disagree with is the fact that he bands together in entire conferences, whether it’s the SEC or the Big Ten, and says that these are worlds better than the Pac-12 and the Big 12.

The Pac-12 and even the Big 12 to some extent were probably holistically more competitive than the SEC top to bottom, but due to their nature of battling each other due to the lineup, often don’t make the playoffs and are considered less. Outside of Ohio State which won the championship in the first year of the playoffs, no other Big Ten team won a playoff game, so for Herbstreit to regroup in the Big Ten as if his alma mater had not carried the burden of the conference is surely interesting.

Next season will be a huge year for the Pac-12 who will have six legitimate conference contenders and a chance to finally end their playoff drought. The Big 12 will also rely on its biggest brands from Texas, Oklahoma and now TCU to represent them. However, just making the playoffs won’t be enough to end this conversation. Until someone from the Pac-12 and the Big 12 wins it all, the college football world is going to act like the entire SEC and Big Ten are better worlds. When in reality, we are witnessing two dynasties at the same time, and do not take the time to appreciate the greatness of these, and rather disparage those who are not so good at the moment. The news flash, what Alabama has done and what Georgia is doing now, is extremely rare. Comparing anyone to that is pretty weird.

All that to say, the expanded playoffs will be the best-case scenario for college football. This eliminates the conversation of the committee picking the wrong teams (mostly), and it gives programs that are biased against them and their conference a chance to prove whether or not they belong. It will also lead to results we can never imagine and really determine who is the better team from week to week.

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