Dec 7, 2024; Atlanta, GA, USA; ESPN announcer Paul Finebaum before the 2024 SEC Championship game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Credit: Brett Davis-Imagn Images

Automatic byes are good until they’re bad. Rust is a thing until it isn’t. Regardless, the goalposts will be moved. And after a College Football Playoff that saw all four top seeds eliminated in their respective first game(s), Paul Finebaum is calling for change.

Finebaum calling for change in college football?

Certainly, we’ve never heard of that before.

Finebaum has emerged as the biggest critic of the College Football Playoff and its committee since the field was first announced last month. And he has continued to criticize the playoff even as some of his chosen narratives about the SEC’s dominance and the teams that didn’t belong have fallen apart.

Even if the seeding format is unlikely to change for 2025, that didn’t stop Finebaum from having a go at two teams that received byes for winning their conferences in Boise State and Arizona State.

He used what he viewed as an “ultimate flaw” in the system to dump on the two schools, even after the Sun Devils came within a controversial targeting no-call and 4th and 13 conversion from beating Texas.

“I think you have to remember that two of those bye teams really had no business getting byes, and that was the ultimate flaw in the system,” Finebaum said Friday, as covered by On3. “Arizona State and Boise State should not have — should have been playing on the road the very first weekend, and we wouldn’t even have this conversation.

“But Oregon is an outlier. It has been a problem for that program. It’s been such a great program, but in the big games — last year, of course, twice against Washington and this year, the second game against Ohio State; they really just could not get it done.”

On a weekend where all four teams who got a bye lost, why are only Boise State and Arizona State being singled out? It’s another take in a familiar pattern of there being no credit given to the have-nots but all the hypothetical credit in the world to the haves.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that Finebaum tore into SMU and Indiana and mocked the committee for giving fans “blockbusters” when hours later, Tennessee went into Columbus and was blown out by Ohio State. Incredibly, the same Indiana team that was widely derided for its loss in South Bend finished closer to Notre Dame than SEC champion Georgia did at a neutral site.

The longtime ESPN college football analyst who often takes up for the SEC, even if he waved the white flag in Alabama’s honor this week, has found issues with the CFP format at nearly every step of the way. And this year that may include a nightmare scenario in SEC country in the possibility of an All-Big Ten College Football Playoff title game that he says would “change the paradigm of college football.”

And there may be another Big Ten school that didn’t even qualify for the playoff to thank for that.

“But ultimately, the team that I think that hasn’t been mentioned yet, that deserves the most credit, is Michigan,” Finebaum added, per On3. “That win against Ohio State did something to Ryan Day and his program that I can’t explain, but it may be the story of the CFP this year if Ohio State can win it all.”

Ultimately, Finebaum’s frustration with the seeding, the byes and the perceived “flaws” in the system may be more about the performance of the SEC in the postseason than anything else.

[On3]

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.