SMU’s path to the CFP is clear … and clearly ironic

Karma comes at you in strange ways. Sometimes it hits like a sledgehammer, sometimes like a creeping fog. And sometimes, karma shows up riding a mustang.

SMU is one of the best teams in the ACC this season, a legitimate conference championship and playoff contender despite the fact that the Mustangs aren’t receiving any of the ACC’s TV riches. That’s funny enough, but when you factor in another element—Florida State’s woeful 2024 faceplant—well, that raises SMU’s season to the level of art.

The Mustangs are 5-0 in the ACC, 8-1 overall, leading the conference and in prime position to challenge for a first-round bye in the College Football Playoff. Florida State, meanwhile, is 1-7 in the conference and 1-9 overall, a failure so catastrophic it’ll leave scars on this program for years.

Yes, the irony is thick here; Florida State is in the midst of a lawsuit against the SEC over what the school claims is an unfair distribution of media rights revenue. The lawsuit is widely viewed as a pretext for FSU to leave the ACC, which is locked into a TV deal until 2036, for richer pastures.

Meanwhile, SMU isn’t accepting any TV revenue from the ACC for nine years, the price necessary to join the conference. It’s turning out to be some excellent exposure for SMU, and a hell of a deal for the ACC — at least the bully kicking everyone’s butt isn’t taking their lunch money. Yet.

So let’s do what the rest of the ACC has done and leave Florida State behind. How legitimate of a contender is SMU? Both the AP and the CFP rankings have the Mustangs ranked No. 14 and behind Miami, despite the fact that SMU lost to Big 12 leader BYU and Miami lost to unranked Georgia Tech.

The disparity in rankings is largely a result of the early-season disparity between the two, and soon enough, it won’t matter; if both Miami and SMU win out, they’ll meet in December in the ACC championship with an almost certain first-round CFP playoff bye on the line. The question beyond that is, would the ACC runner-up get a slot in the playoff with two losses?

The answer: Probably not. The reason: Ole Miss, which leaped from 16th in last week’s standings to 11th this week, right over SMU. Big wins factor heavily in the CFP committee’s thinking, apparently, and SMU has no more big wins to gain outside of the ACC championship. The Mustangs close with Boston College (5-4, 2-3 conference), Virginia (5-4, 3-3) and Cal (5-4, 1-4) — wonderful schools, all, but not what you need when you’re looking for football legitimacy.

The problem that both SMU and Miami face is — more irony — exactly what Florida State is, in part, complaining about: the ACC as a conference is so weak that a standard conference schedule doesn’t provide enough meat for a convincing case of higher rankings. Also hurting their cause: both Miami and SMU managed to avoid playing Clemson, the only other team in the ACC with any kind of national heft.

Matter of fact, even this far into the season, Miami and SMU only have three common opponents — stupid expanded conferences — and they’re both 3-0 against those opponents. Both teams beat Louisville by a touchdown and whomped FSU. SMU needed overtime to beat Duke, while Miami handled the Blue Devils easily. Cal still awaits on SMU’s slate; Miami had a memorable comeback win against the #Calgorithm earlier this season.

CFP committee chairman Warde Manuel addressed the SMU-or-Miami issue when announcing the rankings, saying that the committee’s “feeling was that Miami was ahead of SMU in terms of their performance this year.”

Numbers-wise, Manuel is probably right; Miami averages nearly 100 yards more offense and five points per game than SMU. Record-wise? Eh. That’s where it gets muddy, and beauty contests generally don’t pick muddy contestants.

Don’t expect SMU to buy into the CFP’s logic. “To look at our league and say, ‘Well, we may be a one-bid league,’ but you look at another league that we have a winning record against and say, ‘Oh, they’re going to get four in,’ it doesn’t make sense to me,” SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee told the media on Tuesday. “Make it make sense.”

The ACC leads the Big Ten 3-2 this season, and while the conference is 2-5 against the SEC, four ACC-SEC rivalry games are still to be played.

You can debate the committee’s judgment — again, who would you rather see across the field, BYU or Georgia Tech? — but fortunately for SMU, there’s the finest remedy possible waiting at the end of the season.

“We’ve just got to win,” Lashlee added. “I’m not going to gripe or politic for us. We’ve got to win. If we don’t win, we don’t deserve to be in the conversation.”

There might only be one road into the CFP for SMU, but it’s direct, no turns or questions. And mustangs can run a straight line awfully fast.