After Clemson’s last-gasp thriller, College Football Playoff committee faces a massive decision

CHARLOTTE — Dabo Swinney glared into an ESPN camera to deliver a warning to the College Football Playoff selection committee, not about his team but the one his team just beat.

“Listen,” he said, “that’s a playoff football team. SMU better be in the dang playoffs.”

It is not often that a coach, immediately after a heart-pounding victory, not just praises but lobbies on behalf of his opponent. But on Saturday night, in this new, odd playoff expansion world, that’s what happened here just before the clock struck midnight on the east coast.

The story on this night should be how Clemson won the ACC championship game: in a wild, furious final few seconds, on the foot of freshman kicker Nolan Hauser, a Charlotte metro-area native whose title game-record 56-yard field goal as time expired split the uprights and sparked an orange-coated eruption at Bank of America Stadium.

But there’s another story here, perhaps one that is more important: With its 34-31 win over SMU, Clemson became the first-ever College Football Playoff bid stealer. For some team — SMU or Alabama — the bubble has popped. And for the ACC’s football dynasty — the Clemson Tigers — a playoff spot, improbable just a week ago, is secured.

Bludgeoned by Georgia to open the season, whipped by Louisville midway through and beaten at home by South Carolina just last week, Dabo’s Tigers couldn’t possibly make the playoff, right?

Here they are. Swinney is back in football’s newly expanded big dance. The Tigers (10-3) will grab the final of the five automatic bids designated for the five highest-ranked conference champions. We think. We won’t know for sure until around Noon ET on Sunday when the selections are unveiled on ESPN.

There’s a good chance that Swinney’s group will be the No. 11 or 12 seed with a first-round game on the road against several possibilities, including Notre Dame, Penn State and Texas.

Things are a bit more suspenseful for SMU. Are the Mustangs still in the field? Ranked No. 8 entering this game, they needed to avoid one thing on Saturday: getting the doors kicked in. Down 24-7 at halftime, it appeared as if the doors were on their way to being kicked in. Alas, coach Rhett Lashlee’s Ponies stormed back with a wild second-half effort, most of it resting on the shoulder of quarterback Kevin Jennings and his 31 completions and 304 yards.

They roared back to tie the game with 16 seconds left and, seemingly, send it to overtime before a wild set of events: Clemson’s Adam Randall picked a perfect time for his biggest kick return of the year, 41 yards, that set up a 17-yard completion to position the Tigers, as seconds ticked down, for the 56-yard boot.

Heart pounding. Heart wrenching.

Rollicking. Rewarding.

And now, back in Dallas, not far from the SMU campus actually, the selection committee’s Saturday night and Sunday morning — when they make their final picks — got a lot more interesting.

They’ve got two teams for one spot:

– an 11-2 ACC runner-up with zero top-25 wins and a 75th-ranked strength of schedule, with its two losses against top-20 teams.

– a 9-3 SEC fourth-place finisher with two top-15 wins, an 18th-ranked strength of schedule, with two of its losses to unranked foes.

Ranked No. 8 and already in the projected field before the title game, SMU sits at a precarious and precedent-inducing spot: Will the committee move out of the playoff field a championship game loser?

Such a move could pave the way for the elimination of conference title games in this expanded playoff world, something ACC commissioner Jim Phillips (and others) have suggested.

He re-emphasized that on Saturday night: “It would create dangerous repercussions to the sport to reward teams that don’t have to play an additional game,” he said in a statement.

The SMU argument has plenty of merit. While a host of playoff contenders sat home on Saturday — Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio State, Notre Dame and Alabama — SMU played an extra game. Why should it be penalized? And, oh, there is that game two weeks ago when Alabama lost 24-3 at 6-6 Oklahoma, one of the ugliest defeats for any playoff contender.

Then again, there is the other side from the folks in Tuscaloosa: The Mustangs got beat on a neutral field by a three-loss team that got hammered by SEC champion Georgia and beat by SEC fifth-place finisher South Carolina.

SMU can look to themselves for Saturday. In the first half alone, the Mustangs turned it over twice, dropped three passes and committed three critical 15-yard penalties that put them in that 17-point hole.

But their comeback can’t be ignored, said Lashlee, who gave an impassioned defense of his club and its playoff chances.

“I think they showed the championship makeup they have the way they battled back,” he said.

“It would be criminal if we are not in. It would be wrong not just to our team but to what college football stands for,” he said. “We could have not showed up [for the ACC championship game] and according to what we saw Tuesday night [in the rankings], we’d be in. We showed it. We should be in. They know we should be in.”

As he spoke at the postgame news conference, Lashlee said his team was in the locker room not just struggling with the loss but the possibility of being left out of the playoff: “Their faith in the system is shaken.”

In many ways, the SMU-Bama debate comes down to an SEC vs. ACC debate. Last year, the SEC won that debate in one of the most controversial decisions (Alabama over Florida State) in CFP history.

On Saturday night and into the wee hours of Sunday morning, the 13-member selection committee will gather to decide such things in their spacious conference room in the Gaylord Texan, a resort in suburban Dallas.

Six athletic directors, four former coaches, two former players and an ex-media member will determine the fate of the Ponies and the Tide. But there’s much more to discuss, too, several key decisions that’ll have committee members squirming as they slurp down their free ice cream:

– How will they seed the other championship game losers, Penn State and Texas, relative to Notre Dame and Ohio State? Remember, Penn State lost at home to Ohio State, and Texas has zero top-25 wins this season.

– Does Arizona State jump in front of Boise State for the No. 3 seed?

– Does Clemson jump in front of Arizona State for the No. 4 seed and a first-round bye? The Tigers were 17th and Sun Devils 15th entering this weekend.

Decisions, decisions.

But the most important of them could set a precedent for years to come related to conference championship games.

Does SMU fall out of the field completely?

In October, the CFP’s new executive director, Rich Clark, was asked how the committee might treat conference championship game losers.

“Well,” he said, “it depends on what the loss looks like.”

Here’s how it looked: The game-winning 56-yard field goal would not have been good from 58.