Nick has never been shy about stirring the pot to Bama’s benefit, and that’s what he’s doing here. There’s already a baked-in prejudice against the G5. Until the Super-Two are ready to make a clean break, it’s not too much to ask to consider that the mighty SEC teams must stop losing games that other P5 teams did not, in order to be invited to a playoff.

Now, I’m potentially biased as a TCU fan, but short football seasons mean a lot of datapoints don’t properly line up with real world results. One of the things we learned about Alabama last year is that they were a team capable of losing two games, and for three other P5 teams, we only had enough data to prove conclusively that were going to lose 1 game.

If there’s such a thing as a moral theory of sport, it’s that within certain common sense competitive frameworks (which the P5/G5 split imperfectly approximates) you must actually win in order to progress in a competition, and it’s not the fault of an individual team if the sport is too unwieldy to play a balanced schedule long enough for statistical certainty.

Of course, this is also what the 12-team playoff is for, and if he thinks Bama deserves to get in with 3 losses or whatever, he’s off his rocker.