No, Alabama Football, Greg Byrne, Greg Sankey, and other SEC programs are not sore losers

There was an avalanche of college football dissonance on Sunday. A dozen college football programs celebrated. Alabama Football was not one of them. Alabama was not alone. Ole Miss and South Carolina fans are also displeased. All three SEC fanbases have a reason to be disgruntled.

The three, 3-loss SEC teams had justification to complain. That doesn't mean Alabama, South Carolina, and Ole Miss were treated unfairly by the Playoff Selection Committee. In each case, they lost too many games. A valid complaint is that less-deserving teams made the Playoffs. Various computer algorithms ranked Alabama Football above as many as nine teams in the Playoff field. In smaller numbers, Ole Miss and South Carolina can make a similar claim.

BCSKnowHow.com provided how 12 teams would have been ranked in the old BCS system.

The biggest flaw in the Playoff team selection system is having any automatic bids won by conference champions. When the 12-team selection rules were being determined, Greg Sankey's starting point was no automatic bids. He yielded to the then-majority opinion. No one should expect him to be so collegial again.

The current Playoff selection system is so flawed it should be scrapped and a new one devised for a 12 to 16-team field. Part of the problem comes from the weekly series of rankings that effectively locked in teams like Notre Dame, Indiana, and even Penn State and Texas into inflated rankings. As Nick Saban said on Sunday, the problem with SMU's ranking was not what was done after championship weekend, it was that the Mustangs had been ranked too high for weeks before.

Some college football experts believe that SMU in the SEC would be the league's fifth, sixth, or seventh-best team; or worse. And the Ponies lost to another not-good Playoff team that could not beat a road South Carolina team the week before.

As Clint Lamb explained there was a hope the 12-team Playoff format would provide more room for error and lead to better regular season games. With the committee largely ignoring wins over ranked teams, the opposite will happen. Alabama's Greg Byrne was right to speak out on Sunday, calling out the Playoff committee for making decisions that were not good for college football. "We have said that we would need to see how strength of schedule would be evaluated by the CFP. With this outcome, we will need to assess how many P4 non-conference games make sense in the future to put us in the best position to participate in the CFP."

Alabama Football will adjust

Byrne is no sore loser, but he will be forced to amend future Alabama Crimson Tide schedules, dropping out-of-conference games against many Power Four opponents. Competing against SEC teams is brutal and when the loss column matters more than anything else, every OOC game that carries a serious threat of a loss must be dropped. College football will be made worse by such changes. It will be worse for fans and ticket buyers; and worse for the development of rosters. The media companies will have fewer big-game products because Byrne and Alabama will not be the only program to change.

What college football gets in trade is some lesser teams getting to masquerade as championship contenders.