Ahead of Week 13 in the college football season, Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney joined CBS Sports on Saturday morning and defending the Big 12 and ACC against the new 12-team College Football Playoff.
Swinney held nothing back when talking about the way the College Football Playoff is setting up, with a plethora of Big Ten and SEC teams. The National Championship winning coach said, “Just trying to continue to be a consistent program we’ve been for a long time. We’ve got a chance to get a ninth win today, for the 14th-year in a row, and become only the fourth team in the history of college football to do that ever. We just try to stay consistent, control what we can control, and let you guys talk about all that… all I know is we’ve been in four National Championship, we’ve won two of them, second-most playoff wins, won eight league titles in the last 12 years, we schedule tough… We basically have an SEC-Big Ten Invitational, that’s really what we’ve got in college football.”
Here’s the video of Swinney’s comments.
There’s no doubt that the ESPN talking heads are going wild over how to get 4-5 Big Ten and SEC teams into the College Football Playoff, while the Big 12 and ACC might get one or two, max.
While those two conferences are more top heavy, the depth of the Big 12 and ACC is being underappreciated. Heck, even last week, Desmond Howard infamously had no idea why his College GameDay panel was even picking K-State vs. Arizona State, which had huge Big 12, and therefore College Football Playoff implications.
There’s no doubt that the Big 12 will have a tough time getting more than one team, the Big 12 Champion, into the Playoff, but the media narrative around the league, along with the ACC, has shown over-the-top favoritism to the Big Ten and SEC.
Now, we just need some Big 12 coaches, looking at you Coach Prime (!!), to speak out and up on behalf of the Big 12 Conference.
