Sorry, Lane Kiffin: Indiana has clinched a playoff spot. Omitted SEC teams did not

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

“We don’t just beat the top 25 teams, we beat the best of them!” said Cignetti, noting that his teams beat Nebraska and Coastal Carolina earlier this year when he was at JMU. It was a rewind-the-TV moment. Did he really just say that?! It wasn’t true either. The Huskers were already out of the poll when they played the Hoosiers. However, Ohio State came out on top, beating Indiana 38-15.

Cignetti’s bluster ultimately came to nothing. The Hoosiers were whipped by Notre Dame at the line of scrimmage on Friday night. They were two steps slower, and when they trailed 3-20 with 11 minutes to play, Cignetti punted and drilled as if hoping not to be defeated.

A damning statistic 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 had no playing time of 30 yards or more.

With the Hoosiers in control for most of the night — trailing 17-3 at halftime — the college football world had plenty of time to vent. Some tried to question whether Indiana actually belonged in the 12-team playoff field.

Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin didn’t miss the opportunity to make a splash by poking fun at Indiana and the selection committee.

Really exciting competitive game @CFBPlayoff 🧐. Great work!! https://t.co/HEjQ1AcXba

— Lane Kiffin (@Lane_Kiffin) December 21, 2024

But the truth is that no one who didn’t make it to the 12-team playoffs made it. Whatever happens on the field next month won’t change the fact that the teams that weren’t picked simply didn’t do enough to get in.

Kiffin’s Ole Miss team? The Rebels lost three games, including one at home to a terrible Kentucky team that never won another SEC game, and finished 4-8. That loss alone, coupled with the Rebels’ 28-10 home win over Georgia, wouldn’t have kept them out, but they suffered two more losses to unranked LSU and Florida.

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

South Carolina? It was beaten at home by Ole Miss 27-3 and also lost to Alabama and unranked LSU. However, the Gamecocks are coming off a road win against ACC champion Clemson.

Go deeper

Rexrode: Indiana deserves its playoff bid, even if the schedule helped it get there

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

If you think Indiana doesn’t deserve to be in the playoffs, what you’re saying is that Ohio State only had one game this fall, and because it lost that one game, nothing else mattered .

There’s no doubt that some of this criticism of the Hoosiers stems from the fact that they’ve almost never been good before. As was repeatedly noted on Friday night’s broadcast, Indiana is the worst-losing program in college football history. But the playoffs should only consider what happened this year, not the past, even though human nature and those biases have always made it difficult not to creep into the thought process.

Cignetti also didn’t do himself any favors when he said before taking the job that he looked at Indiana’s projected 2024 schedule and was more excited about the Hoosiers’ coaching job.

When college football moved to a 12-team playoff, there was concern that it would devalue the regular season. This fall’s TV ratings would suggest that’s not the case. But if the playoff selection committee ignores wins and losses because it simply wants to go by its own eye test, or what Vegas thinks about potential matchups, or what NFL personnel people think about a team’s “talent,” then so be it will to devalue the regular season, and it’s not worth it, despite all the dubious and knee-jerk reactions when revisionist history intrudes into the dialogue.

Expect more of the same if the playoffs expand to 14 or 16 teams. That would just mean more teams participating with more flawed resumes and more teams sitting at home watching the whole thing.

Go deeper

There aren’t many firsts at Notre Dame. This was one of them

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