LSU Football: A loss to Georgia shouldn’t stop College Football Playoff bid

The LSU football team heads into the SEC Championship Game as the first-ranked team in the nation and should not need a win to get into the College Football Playoffs.

The LSU football team has been the most impressive team in the nation this season and the team being the number one ranked team in the nation is indicative of that. The voters let Ohio State take the number one ranking for a spin, but the best team in the nation all season has been LSU.

The LSU Tigers have one more chance to prove themselves this season before the College Football Playoffs in the SEC Championship against the Georgia Bulldogs, who are the fourth-ranked team in the nation.

This is the first time since 2011 that the Tigers are playing in the SEC Championship Game, where they defeated the 12th-ranked Georgia Bulldogs, 42-10.

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The Bulldogs are a formidable team but it is nothing new for the Tigers, who have been playing and beating some of the best teams in the country all season. Despite this, it still feels like the general public is not buying in on LSU, and if LSU were to lose this game, you know there would be a lot of talk about keeping them out of the College Football Playoffs.

The only thing that it should impact is the team’s ranking going into the playoffs. Win or lose, LSU has already put together a resume that is impossible to deny. And if they do deny it, it will be some of the largest hypocrisy that the committee could commit.

LSU has beaten four top-10 teams this season, albeit Texas is no longer ranked. It started against Texas, continued with Florida and Auburn and finished with Alabama, who was a top-five team before losing in the Iron Bowl to Auburn.

That is a murder’s row of teams and no other team in the nation boasts that kind of resume. A win over fourth-ranked Georgia will likely kick them out of the playoffs, but losing to fourth-ranked Georgia should not dismiss everything else the team has accomplished.

Who else is the committee going to let in? The winner of the PAC-12 Championship Game between Utah and Oregon is probably the common answer but neither the Utes or Ducks have close to the resume that LSU has.

Utah does not have a single win against a team that finished in the top-25. The one team that they did play that finished in the top-25, the USC Trojans, defeated them in a game that they controlled from whistle to whistle. Oregon would be the first.

Oregon is ranked even lower than Utah at 13 and has no wins over ranked teams. They lost to Auburn, a team that LSU beat, in the first week of the season.

Oklahoma or Baylor could make a case depending on who wins the Big-12 Championship but even they do not have the resume that LSU has. Oklahoma’s most impressive wins this season are against Baylor and Texas while Baylor too has beaten Texas.

So aside from each other, the most impressive win that either team could have is the least impressive of LSU’s “impressive wins”. Let that sink in.

The committee voted Alabama into the 2017 College Football Playoffs even though the Crimson Tide did not even play in the SEC Championship as they lost to Auburn in the Iron Bowl.

That Alabama team had two wins over ranked opponents, third-ranked Florida State in Week 1 and 19th-ranked Mississippi State. Florida State was dropped out of the top-25 ranking after Week 4 and Mississippi State finished 19th.

If the committee let that Alabama team into the playoffs and does not let this LSU football team into the playoffs then it will only prove that even they don’t know what makes a playoff team.