Sorry, Lane Kiffin: Indiana earned a Playoff spot. SEC teams that got left out did not

Curt Cignetti, once again, didn’t hold back. His team was less than two hours away from kicking off its first College Football Playoff game, and the 63-year-old Indiana head coach sat in the middle of the “College GameDay” set and went right at the skeptics.

“We don’t just beat Top 25 teams, we beat the s— out of them!” Cignetti said, referencing that his teams had beaten Nebraska earlier this year and Coastal Carolina when he was at JMU. It was a rewind-the-TV moment. As in, did he really just say that?! It also wasn’t true. The Huskers had fallen out of the poll by the time they played the Hoosiers. Ohio State was ranked, though, and beat Indiana 38-15.

Cignetti’s bluster ultimately fell flat. The Hoosiers were whipped at the line of scrimmage Friday night by Notre Dame. They were two steps slower, and when they were down 20-3 with 11 minutes left in the game, Cignetti punted and coached like he was hoping not to get routed.

A damning stat about Cignetti’s team this year: Against 11 unranked opponents, Indiana averaged 46 points per game. In two games against ranked teams, Indiana averaged 16 points and didn’t have a play of 30 yards or longer.

Because the Hoosiers were getting handled for much of the night — they trailed 17-3 at halftime — the college football world had plenty of time to vent. Some tried to relitigate whether Indiana actually belonged in the 12-team Playoff field.

Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin didn’t miss his chance to stir the pot, mocking Indiana and the selection committee.

Really exciting competitive game @CFBPlayoff 🧐. Great job!!

— Lane Kiffin (@Lane_Kiffin) December 21, 2024

But the truth is, no one who didn’t make the 12-team Playoff earned their way into it. Whatever happens on the field over the next month won’t change the fact that the teams that didn’t get picked simply didn’t do enough to get in.

Kiffin’s Ole Miss team? The Rebels lost three games, including one at home against a dreadful Kentucky team that didn’t win another SEC game and finished 4-8. That loss by itself, coupled with the Rebels’ 28-10 home win over Georgia, wouldn’t have kept them out, but they had two other losses against unranked LSU and Florida.

Alabama? The Tide also beat Georgia, but they had an embarrassing 24-3 beatdown at the hands of a mediocre Oklahoma team in late November. Alabama also gave up 40 points in a loss to 6-6 Vanderbilt and lost to Tennessee.

South Carolina? It got blown out 27-3 by Ole Miss at home, and it also lost to Alabama and unranked LSU. The Gamecocks do have a road win over ACC champion Clemson, though.

Indiana went 11-1 in the regular season. The Hoosiers don’t have impressive wins on their resume. Not one. But they did blow out almost everybody they faced. Only 7-5 Michigan, the team that upset Ohio State at the end of the season, got within two touchdowns of them until the Buckeyes. But Indiana played who was on its schedule. That schedule did have the two teams that actually played for last season’s national title — the Wolverines and Washington — but both of them had to replace their head coaches and most of their starting lineups. You play who you play, and it’s not IU’s fault how other teams turned out in 2024.

If you don’t think Indiana deserved to make the Playoff, you’re saying it had a one-game schedule this fall at Ohio State, and because it lost that one game, nothing else it did mattered.

There’s no doubt some of this criticism of the Hoosiers is rooted in the fact that they have almost never been good before. As the broadcast Friday night repeatedly noted, Indiana is the losingest program in college football history. But the Playoff is supposed to consider only what happened this year, not the past, even if it’s always been hard for human nature and those biases not to creep into the thought process.

Cignetti didn’t do himself any favors, either, when he said before he took the job that he looked at Indiana’s suspect 2024 schedule and got more excited about the Hoosiers’ coaching vacancy.

One concern as college football moved to a 12-team Playoff was that it would devalue the regular season. The TV ratings this fall would indicate that it hasn’t. But if the Playoff selection committee disregards wins and losses because it wants to just go by its own eye test or what Vegas thinks about potential matchups or what NFL personnel people think of a team’s “talent,” it will devalue the regular season, and that’s not worth it for all of the second-guessing and knee-jerk reactions as the revisionist history seeps into the dialogue.

Expect more of this if and when the Playoff expands to 14 or 16 teams. That would just mean more teams with even more flawed resumes will get in, and more will also be sitting at home watching it.

(Photos of Curt Cignetti and Lane Kiffin: Justin Casterline, Wes Hale / Getty Images)