Should We Tolerate the Intolerant? The Campus Wars Over Free Speech and Anti-Semitism
PLUS: The powers-that-be in college football aim a pie at their face
About a decade ago, I was a teaching assistant in an introductory political philosophy course all political science majors were required to take at the University of Maryland. The course readings included The Prince by Machiavelli (which posits political leaders entrusted with the security of their state need not conform with conventional moral norms); On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (which argues individuals should be free to do whatever they want so long as their actions do not harm others); Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority (which examined how individuals often followed the orders of authority figures even when those individuals were legitimately concerned their actions were directly hurting other people); and Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning (a study of a German militarized police unit tasked with rounding up and executing Jews in Poland during World War II that found most members of that unit carried out their orders out of a sense of group solidarity despite knowing they would have been excused from that assignment had they refused.) Also on the syllabus: Antigone, Nietzsche, and Plato’s Republic.
As you may be able to surmise, a major theme of that course was moral obligation. To what extent are individuals bound to moral and legal codes? When is it necessary to follow our consciences and defy authority or the pressure of the crowd? Should people develop and follow their own moral codes, or does that lead to moral relativism and the dangers associated with that? What makes something morally right or wrong? If I taught the course well, I wouldn’t have necessarily answered those questions by the end of the semester. Instead, I would have lodged them in the minds of my students, so that I and the authors they read would be voices inside their heads when confronted with morally challenging situations later in their lives.
One semester, I worried I hadn’t done my job well at all.
It was actually one of my sharper sections, a group of students who had clearly done the readings and came to class every Friday ready to discuss. I can’t remember exactly how we wandered into the topic, but on the last day of class, we had wound back through Plato to Socrates and the pursuit of truth/knowledge and ended up on the Holocaust when one ordinarily thoughtful, conscientious student asserted we should be open to receiving Hitler’s views about Jewish people as a truth. I pushed back the way a teacher can subtly indicate to a student that they just stepped in it and ought to reconsider, but then two other ordinarily thoughtful, conscientious students spoke up to defend that first student’s position.
Now I should say this about those students: They were not anti-Semitic and did not personally believe what Hitler believed. They were instead insisting it was impossible to know the whole truth about anything, meaning they felt they needed to remain open to and non-judgmental about all truth claims. I suspect they landed on the Hitler claim because it was an extreme example that they believed proved their “tolerance” for different points of view.
I had to push back, in part because I knew there were Jewish students in my classroom. In fact, the best student in my section wore a kippah, and I could tell he could not believe what he was hearing. The responsibility for refuting these claims was not a burden my Jewish students should have been expected to bear. But even if there weren’t Jewish students in my class, I still had an obligation to knock those relativistic arguments down. Why? Because there are some things we know with certainty, and one of those things is this:
Genocide is wrong.
I went on to say that while a free society allows idiots to claim Hitler was right, a good and wise person would know better and reject that claim. Although good college students come to class with open minds, they also come to class in pursuit of the truth. It is possible to begin to know things about the world and to be able to assert with a high level of confidence that some things are right and some things are wrong. We should know by now that Hitler’s ideas about race and ethnicity were wrong, as were the actions he took in accordance with those ideas. If you don’t understand that, you missed the whole point of the class, which was designed to help you build an intellectual framework for good moral decision-making.
Looking back on it, that was actually a pretty easy dilemma to resolve. The debate that broke out this week about free speech and anti-Semitism on college campuses is anything but.
This past Wednesday, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and M.I.T. were brought before a House committee to answer questions about the proliferation of anti-Semitic speech on their campuses since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war. The hearing did not go well for the academics. The flashpoint occurred when Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) asked Penn’s president Elizabeth Magill if “calling for the genocide of Jews violate[s] Penn’s rules or code of conduct” and if “calling for the genocide of Jews…constitute[s] bullying or harassment.” Magill did not give a straightforward yes or no answer, replying instead, “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment,” and that deciding so “is a context-dependent decision.”
Those answers set off a firestorm. Magill’s critics were aghast that she could neither rebuke calls for genocide nor take a firm stand against anti-Semitism. Members of both parties criticized her. The White House, Pennsylvania’s two Democratic senators, and Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor condemned Magill’s testimony. Prominent figures at each university denounced their presidents’ remarks. As of publication, their jobs are up in the air. (UPDATE: Magill resigned Saturday afternoon.)
Magill should have made it clear in that moment that not only did she personally find such rhetoric abhorrent, but that anti-Semitic rhetoric and calls for genocide run counter to the values of the University of Pennsylvania and would draw the scrutiny of campus authorities. She needed to affirm that “calling for the genocide of Jews” was morally wrong.
Yet many articles that have dug into this episode note—almost apologetically—that Magill has the spirit of the law on her side. As Yascha Mounk wrote in The Atlantic, “In a narrow, technical sense, the three presidents were correct to state that their current policies would probably not penalize offensive political speech.” That’s because those universities’ policies for the most part mirror Supreme Court jurisprudence on the First Amendment. In a free speech society, penalizing someone for their speech actually would depend on context (i.e., if the belief was simply stated vs. directed in a threatening manner at someone or a group of people) and if calls for genocide morphed into conduct (which would not necessarily need to reach the extreme threshold of an actual genocidal act; a physical altercation or an act of intimidation might be enough.) The bottom line is that the First Amendment lets people speak, even when that speech is politically unpopular or morally abhorrent.
It’s also worth noting Stefanik did ask a somewhat technical legal question about the university’s “rules and code of conduct” and if certain speech “constituted bullying and harassment.” While Magill has been criticized for failing to respond to Stefanik’s questions with moral clarity, her admittedly tone deaf and ambiguous answers at least stayed on-topic.
Magill’s critics, many of whom likely saw only a few seconds of her exchange with Stefanik, also missed out on some important context. Michelle Goldberg observed in the New York Times that Stefanik had attempted to link calls for “intifada” (an Arabic word for “uprising” that has been used to describe periods of intense and typically violent Palestinian protest against Israel) to calls for violence against Jews and genocide. As Goldberg noted, though, unlike a phrase such as “gas the Jews,” phrases like “intifada” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” have contested meanings. For some, those phrases are generically pro-Palestinian or signal support for the Palestinian people. Others associate them with active defiance of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Still others hear something more sinister in that language. Goldberg’s point, however, is that those phrases do not have clear, widely-accepted meanings, which would obviously affect the way a college official might think about and respond to such speech. It was within the context of that issue when Stefanik began asking about “calling for the genocide of Jews,” which can explain why the presidents offered such equivocal, legalistic answers to Stefanik’s new questions.
Goldberg seemed less concerned with the presidents’ performances than with the motive underlying Stefanik’s line of questioning. In Goldberg’s view, Stefanik was attempting to conflate pro-Palestinian rhetoric with pro-genocidal rhetoric to bait the college presidents into denouncing Palestinian activists. Despite widespread pro-Palestinian protests throughout the country, there is a legitimate concern that political and social pressure may ultimately have a chilling effect on pro-Palestinian speech as well as criticism of Israel’s pursuit of the war in Gaza. The stigma politicians like Stefanik are attempting to attach to Palestinian advocacy is concerning to free speech advocates. It’s also highly ironic when it comes from conservative politicians who have been screaming for years that identity politics, critical race theory, and “political correctness” have turned America’s colleges and universities into places that are now hostile to free speech. Stefanik’s line of questioning seems to suggest her idea of free speech really amounts to free speech for those whose speech she likes.
But that’s not to let the university presidents off the hook when it comes to free speech, either. While they may seem remarkably (even excessively) tolerant of unpopular speech in this case, they have been involved in episodes that have seen individuals penalized for far less than “calling for the genocide of Jews.” While I think Andrew Sullivan typically overstates the significance of this issue within American society, he is worth reading this week for his indictment of “woke” campus culture and how it has led to this moment. Additionally, many Jewish Americans are justifiably upset that college officials rushed to the defense of other minorities and historically marginalized people in the United States when speakers said offensive things about those groups but struggled to defend Jews when they were confronted with similarly offensive language. These concerns are well-founded as well, as Jews are the target of over 60% of religious-based hate crimes in the United States despite representing less than 3% of the American population.
There is no easy resolution to this case. The easiest way out would be to default to the maximalist free speech position and tolerate all speech so long as it doesn’t, to cite the majority opinion in the Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), “produce or incite imminent lawless action.” Yet leaning on the principle of “toleration” is challenging in its own right. If we are to take the idea of free speech seriously, we need to tolerate views we disagree with. In that way, the idea of free speech promotes tolerance. But what do we do, then, with speech that is intolerant, that isn’t just expressing an idea we disagree with, but that diminishes the humanity of other people? That runs counter to the principle free speech is founded upon and aims to magnify. To tolerate such intolerant views—even when those views are countered by speech advocating for greater tolerance—could lead to greater intolerance. This problem is made infinitely more difficult when there is disagreement over what counts as intolerance, which we find in debates over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I have no good answer to this dilemma. As much as we may like to say we live in a country where we can say anything without consequence, there are actually things we can’t say in public without facing social sanction. What’s challenging about living through this moment in time is that that list of things we can’t say is getting revised as we update what it means to be tolerant and people contest or resist those claims. In general, I think living in a democracy means having to put up with awful and repugnant speech at times, but that’s easy for me to say: How often is a white, heterosexual, Christian male the target of awful and repugnant speech?
That leads me to think we need to somehow tweak the maximalist free speech position so that a principle that is built upon and promotes toleration doesn’t end up undermining a tolerant society. I’m just not sure how to do that yet. I do keep coming back to that class I taught ten years ago when a student began to argue we needed to approach Hitler’s ideology with an open mind. The problem is such ideas have the potential to poison minds and can lead to less open societies. Furthermore, there were students in that class whose lives would be directly affected by the spread of anti-Semitic ideas. That ideology needed to be opposed in an official fashion for their sake. There are some ideas we all have to put up with. Anti-Semitism isn’t one of them.
Signals and Noise
Following up from last week’s article “Trump is a Wannabe Dictator. His Supporters Need to Get Honest About How That Makes Them Feel”:
Sean Hannity: “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?”
Don Trump: 🚨🚨🚨 “Except for day one. I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill. I love this guy. He says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’ I said: ‘No, no, no, other than day one.’” 🚨🚨🚨“Trump Says He’ll Be a Dictator on ‘Day One’” by David A. Graham of The Atlantic. (But what if he doesn’t get everything dictated on Day One? Does his dictatorship carry over to Day Two? For a week? For a month?)
This came to mind:
In another article, Graham warns that Trump’s rhetoric this time around needs to be taken seriously, as it is laced with far more menace than it was 4-8 years ago. (“Trump himself has changed, too—the old Trump seemed to be running for office partly for fun and partly in service of his signature views, such as opposition to immigration and support for protectionism. Today’s Trump is different. His fury over his 2020 election defeat, the legal cases against him, and a desire for revenge against political opponents have come to eclipse everything else.”)
Jonathan Last of The Bulwark looks at how Trump isn’t hiding his dictatorial aspirations and the constituency for such a leader.
🚨🚨🚨 “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media… We’re going to come after you—whether it’s criminal or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice and Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we’re tyrannical. This is why we're dictators because we're actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.”—Trump advisor Kash Patel, to Steve Bannon. Patel worked for the National Security Council under Trump, was considered for the position of acting director of the CIA, and was made chief of staff to Trump’s acting Secretary of Defense at the end of Trump’s term. 🚨🚨🚨
More nightmare fuel: Axios has an insider article about who would staff a second Trump administration.
Trump shared Robert Kagan’s Washington Post editorial warning about the dangers a second Trump presidency poses to American democracy to his social media page.
“In my view, fundamentally there’s a choice to be made: You can’t be both for Donald Trump and for the Constitution. You have to choose.”—Liz Cheney, on CBS’s Face the Nation. Cheney also said a GOP House majority in January 2025 posed a “threat” to the United States.
“Why a Second Trump Presidency May be More Radical Than His First” by Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman
“If Trump Wins”, a collection of essays from writers for The Atlantic
And how this is a party-wide problem: The Texas Republican Party stripped language from (of all things) a pro-Israel resolution that would have banned the party from associating with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers. Board members also attempted to keep a record of the vote hidden from the public.
Former Republican Rep. and Trump critic Adam Kinzinger states the obvious in an article titled “Santos Expelled for Being Donald Trump”. (“It seems telling. A liar, fraud, money launderer, indicted, hanger on-er is expelled from Congress, while a liar, fraud, money launderer, indicted, hanger on-er is leading the GOP race for President. This conundrum is not a conundrum at all. In fact, it’s a feature of today’s GOP.”)
The Washington Post reports many of the people Trump pardoned as president are helping him campaign, contributing money to his bid, or disseminating false claims about the 2020 election.
The ten false electors in Wisconsin who signed official-looking documents claiming Trump won the state in 2020 have agreed to a settlement that removes the threat of a financial penalty for their actions in exchange for an admission that they are not official electors and that Biden rightfully won Wisconsin.
A former police chief who brought a hatchet to the Capitol riot and shared conspiracy theories during this trial was sentenced to 11 years in prison for participating in the insurrection.
“That statement is not true. I was not depressed, I WAS ANGRY, and it was not that I was not eating, it was that I was eating too much.”—Don Trump helpfully clarifying a claim in Liz Cheney’s new book that Kevin McCarthy felt compelled to travel to Mar-a-Lago to visit Trump shortly after he left office because “the former president was depressed and not eating.”
Biden’s approval/disapproval rating is down to 37-63% in a new CNN poll, which is eight points lower than where he started the year and three points higher than Trump’s approval ratings following 1/6.
Matt Lewis of The Daily Beast writes it would be politically advantageous for Joe Biden if Republicans impeached him.
A Harvard poll found fewer young voters are planning to vote in 2024 than in 2020. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that fewer young Republican and independent voters plan on not voting than young Democratic voters.
CBS News reports a conservative grassroots effort currently underway has purged thousands of eligible voters from voter rolls.
Senate Democrats have stated negotiations with Republicans over a border bill are dead, imperiling a broader deal on funding Biden desires for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan (although impasses like this are common when a party is poised to accept an unpalatable deal but want to signal to their base they aren’t happy with it.) MORE: By midweek, Democrats were even more angry, associating Republican efforts to link the bills to “hostage taking.” (For what it’s worth, Republican Texas Senator John Cornyn has admitted as much, saying this is not a “traditional negotiation” and that the border bill is the “price that has to be paid” for the supplemental bill.) FURTHER: Senate Republicans used the filibuster to block a standalone Ukraine and Israel aid bill. Both sides are beginning to question if there is a way forward.
Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal reports House Speaker Mike Johnson appears to be a surprise supporter of Ukraine aid.
Republican Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville is releasing his hold on hundreds of military promotions (essentially everyone under the three-star rank.) He still plans on maintaining holds on about ten four-star generals and officers.
Kevin McCarthy is resigning from the House at the end of the year. That will leave Republicans with a two-vote majority.
McCarthy lieutenant and former interim House speaker Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) will not seek re-election.
House Speaker Mike Johnson released footage from 1/6 but blurred the faces of the rioters.
Mike Johnson compared himself to Moses at a Christian Nationalist gathering. News flash: Dude’s not Moses. He’s just some guy from Louisiana.
Hunter Biden has been charged by a California grand jury with nine criminal counts for allegedly not paying taxes.
Police are investigating Christian Ziegler, the chair of the Florida Republican Party, for sexually assaulting a woman he and his wife Bridget (a co-founder of the parents-right group Moms for Liberty, someone who worked with Gov. Ron DeSantis on anti-LGBTQ legislation, and a DeSantis-appointed board member of the district governing Disneyworld) had a three-way sexual encounter with. A video recording of the encounter is said to exonerate him.
One of the Republicans seeking George Santos’s old House seat was convicted this week for participating in the Capitol riot. His defense: He didn’t know Congress met in the Capitol. He’s got a lot to learn if he wins that election.
In the first case of its kind in the nation, a Texas judge has granted a woman permission to get an abortion despite the state’s abortion ban. The woman in the case is 20-weeks pregnant and carrying a fetus with a fatal condition. She has visited the emergency room multiple times due to complications from pregnancy. An induced pregnancy or c-section could endanger her ability to have another child. UPDATE: The Texas Supreme Court on Saturday halted the judge’s ruling.
New Hampshire Republicans are proposing a 15-day abortion ban.
Missouri Republicans have proposed a bill that would allow murder charges for women who get an abortion.
Consumers should be heartened by this news from David Harrison of the Wall Street Journal: Goods deflation—the decline in prices of durable items like appliances, furniture, and used cars—is here and could speed the return to 2% overall inflation. (Economywide deflation, which would be very problematic, does not appear to be in the works.)
Noah Smith looks at the gap between economic vibes and data and find many common gripes about the current economy don’t match the facts or even lived experience. An interesting chart he shared comparing attitudes about the economy in the United States to other nations. Note the divergence between the actual and expected attitudes regarding the economy only occurs in the United States. A good question is why.
Yet the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey found consumer expectations for inflation have dropped to levels last seen prior to the most recent bout of inflation.
Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post writes about how a second Trump administration would only end up making inflation worse. MORE from Rampell: “How Good is the U.S. Economy? It’s Beating Pre-Pandemic Predictions”
The Biden administration has forgiven another $5 billion in student loans.
The Biden administration has concluded it has the legal authority to seize the patents of prescription drugs created with government funding. Do so could lower the prices of such drugs by allowing other pharmaceutical companies to manufacture the medicines.
Scientists at the UN climate conference are telling attendees it is a foregone conclusion the world will exceed the 1.5 degree Celsius global warming cap put in place during the Paris Climate Agreement eight years ago. That puts the planet on pace for catastrophic climate change.
A new report contends the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet is nearly imminent. The collapse of that ice sheet would have irreversible consequences for the planet’s climate.
James Bikales of Politico found Congress authorized spending $7.5 billion on electric vehicle chargers two years ago but not a single one has been installed.
Bold talk from Joe Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry, who told the UN climate conference that coal plants shouldn’t be permitted anywhere in the world.
Barak Ravid of Axios reports Egypt has warned Israel of a potential rupture in relations if Palestinian refugees begin to flee Gaza to the Sinai peninsula.
Israel is expanding evacuation orders to southern Gaza, where many displaced Gazans from the north have already moved. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel will need to occupy Gaza long after the war ends.
Alon Pinkas of Haaretz writes Netanyahu, in a purely political calculation, seems poised to blame Biden for “holding him back” in Gaza, thus snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Messenger reports Biden’s efforts to reconcile with Arab and Muslim Americans in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war is not going well.
Citing Israel’s actions in Gaza, Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has come out against providing Israel with additional military funding. (Sanders joined Republicans in filibustering the standalone Ukraine/Israel aid bill.)
The Washington Post looks at how miscalculations and divisions between Ukraine and the United States led to Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive this year.
Russia is cracking-down on gay nightclubs and bars after a court ruled the “global LGBTQ+ movement” an extremist group.
Garbage Time: The Powers-That-Be in College Football Aim a Pie at Their Face
(Garbage Time theme song here)
Tis the season for some very shady math. American college football has a four-team playoff system to determine a national champion. Three major-conference football teams ended the season with perfect 13-0 records. Yet only two of those teams made the final cut for the playoffs.
Here’s the deal: Going into last weekend’s slate of conference championship games, there were four undefeated major-conference teams: #1 Georgia (SEC), #2 Michigan (Big Ten), #3 Washington (Pac 12), and #4 Florida State (ACC). There were also four one-loss major conference teams: #5 Oregon (Pac 12), #6 Ohio State (Big Ten), #7 Texas (Big 12), and #8 Alabama (SEC).
Each of the undefeated teams was playing for a conference championship.
In the SEC, #1 Georgia was facing off against #8 Alabama, who was undefeated in conference play but lost back in September to #7 Texas of the Big 12.
Second-ranked Michigan was taking on an offensively-challenged Iowa team for the Big Ten championship; a week earlier, when they were ranked third, Michigan knocked-off then-#2 Ohio State.
In the Pac 12, #3 Washington was lined-up for a rematch with #5 Oregon, whose only loss all season was by three points at Washington.
Fourth-ranked Florida State—playing without both their star quarterback Jordan Travis (season-ending leg injury) for the second straight week and their backup quarterback (concussion)—found themselves taking on a two-loss Louisville team.
Additionally, #7 Texas, was playing for the Big 12 conference title against a three-loss Oklahoma State squad. Texas’s only loss came in early October to Oklahoma (who would go on to lose in consecutive weeks to Kansas and Oklahoma State.) But recall Texas had earlier defeated #8 Alabama in a non-conference game.
With one major exception, the higher-ranked team won each of the conference championship games: Michigan dispatched Iowa, Washington won another thriller by three-points over Oregon (who now had two losses), Florida State did enough to defeat Louisville 16-6, and Texas stomped Oklahoma State. But it was Alabama’s 27-24 upset of undefeated Georgia that threw everything into chaos.
One would assume the committee picking the four teams for the playoffs would automatically select the three remaining undefeated teams (Michigan, Washington, and Florida State) for the tournament. Selecting the fourth team would be tough, though. Alabama went undefeated in conference play (barely) and had just upset the #1 team in the nation, so it made some sense to pick them, but that would have infuriated Texas, a one-loss conference champ that could legitimately claim they deserved the spot over Alabama since they had already defeated the Crimson Tide. The committee also could have picked Georgia, since the two-time defending champions had been the #1 team all-season and had only lost the conference championship game, but then the team they had just lost to—Alabama—would have claimed they deserved Georgia’s spot.
Lost in all this was Ohio State, whose only loss all season was by seven points on the road against Michigan, the team that ended the season ranked #1. I’m not sure why there wasn’t more talk about selecting Ohio State as the fourth team. College football analysts seemed to discount the team after that Michigan loss, claiming the Buckeyes weren’t all that good to begin with, but that begs the question as to why the committee had been so high on Ohio State all season. If the so-called “eye test” kept a one-loss Ohio State team out of the final four, why had that same eye test slotted them in as either the #1 or #2 team in the college football playoff rankings for so much of the season? My guess is the committee didn’t want two Big Ten teams in the playoffs, but they’ve put two teams from the same conference (usually the SEC) in the playoffs before. It’s true Ohio State didn’t have a signature win (their two best wins came against #10 Penn State and #16 Notre Dame) but of all the one loss teams, they had the best loss, which came against #1 Michigan. (Texas was saddled with a loss to #12 Oklahoma, while Alabama’s loss came against #3 Texas.) Given the on-field results, picking Ohio State for that fourth spot would have been the cleanest solution.
What the committee did instead was too clever by half: They selected both Alabama and Texas and bounced undefeated Florida State out of the top four on account of their depleted quarterback corps. For the first time ever in the college football playoffs, an undefeated major conference champion would be excluded from the playoffs to determine the national champion.1 Florida State and their fans are understandably pissed.
Now look, I am not someone to dismiss the “eye test” out of hand. I am a fan of the qualitative analysis! But there are some times when quantitative facts must prevail over one’s qualitative judgment, and in sports, the ultimate quantitative fact is one’s record. The objective in football is to win games. Florida State, like only two other teams this season, won all thirteen games they played. No matter what happened to their star quarterback, and no matter how important that one player is to their team, they earned a shot at the title. To deny them that shot is to deny the importance of a team’s record, which is to deny the importance of actually winning, which is to deny the objective of football.
Defenders of Florida State’s omission insist Florida State is not the same team without their star quarterback. That may certainly be the case, as their lackluster showing against Louisville suggests. But it may also be the case Florida State can figure out a way to win without him. It’s not as though obscure backup quarterbacks on good teams can’t step up in big moments. For example:
Also: If an eye test can disqualify a 13-0 team, shouldn’t it also be able to disqualify a 12-1 team? Florida State’s 16-6 win over 10-2 Louisville was deemed “unimpressive,” but that descriptor also applies to Alabama’s final win of the regular season, which came down to this:
That’s right, fourth and goal from the 31 yard line with 43 seconds left in a game against a mediocre 6-5(!) Auburn team. Auburn only rushes three players (if you can call that a rush), giving Alabama quarterback Jalen Milroe six seconds to heave a pass to the corner of the end zone where eight Auburn players somehow can’t cover five Alabama receivers. You can’t say Florida State doesn’t belong in the playoffs without also admitting Alabama shouldn’t have won that game, which would have most definitely kept them out of the playoffs. But only wins and losses—not unimpressive wins or impressive losses—count toward a team’s record.
The argument in college football right now should not be over whether one of the three teams that didn’t lose a game all season should get a spot in the four-team tournament. It should be over which one-loss team—Alabama, Texas, Ohio State, or Georgia—should have gotten the fourth spot. Maybe Georgia deserves it as the season-long consensus number one. Maybe Alabama deserves it for beating Georgia. Maybe Texas deserves it for beating Alabama. Maybe Ohio State deserves it for only losing to the season-ending #1 team. They’d all be furious if someone other than them got that fourth spot, but they wouldn’t be in this spot if they had just won out to begin with. They’re the ones who put themselves in this position.
Yet no matter which one-loss team the committee could have ultimately settled on, the committee would at least have been able to fall back on how hard it was to figure out which of these one-loss teams deserved the spot rather than imply, as they have done with this choice, that records don’t matter in the end. It makes me wonder what two-or-three-loss team could pass the eye test right now and earn a spot in the top four. Or which future major-conference undefeated team could get bounced from the playoffs to make way for a team with a pedigree like that of the SEC’s Alabama.
But here’s how college football’s powers-that-be are really courting disaster. Texas and Alabama are slated to take on Washington and Michigan respectively during the playoffs. Meanwhile, Florida State will face Georgia in the Orange Bowl. It’s possible either Texas or Alabama emerges from that playoff as the national champion, meaning there would be no undefeated team left standing at the end of the season…unless Florida State beats Georgia. A zero-loss Florida State team that knocks off the team nearly everyone believed was the best in the nation for the entirety of the season would have all the right in the world to claim they are the national champion even if Michigan or Washington win it all, but all hell would break loose if Alabama or Texas come out on top, which is a scenario the brain geniuses on the selection committee have teed up for the masses.
If Florida State did win, college football apologists would scramble to claim Georgia was never as good as their reputation suggested (Georgia’s best wins came against #9 Missouri and #11 Mississippi.) But in response, we would then have to ask why those same apologists held Georgia in such high esteem all fall and if Alabama’s victory over Georgia was as impressive as the selection committee made it out to be. In this scenario, write off Georgia, and the committee diminishes Alabama and themselves; admit Georgia is a truly formidable team, and the committee diminishes themselves by not including Florida State in the playoffs.
Anyway, that’s the outcome I’m hoping for: An undefeated Florida State and a one-loss national champion (ideally Alabama.) It’s not that I feel bad for Florida State. I could care less about a football powerhouse. In fact, it’s very possible Florida State falls flat on their face in their game against Georgia, which would prove a.) Just how perceptive the selection committee really is; and b.) The utter pointlessness of the money grab that is the college football playoff, since it would prove the committee, given their wisdom, should be able to just pick the deserving national champion without actually, you know, playing the games.
But I really want to see the powers-that-be in college football with egg on their face. They’re expanding the college football playoffs next year, so it’s unlikely we’ll be gifted with as farcical a situation as the one we’re getting this year. All the more reason, then, to hope for an outcome that once again exposes just how shady this whole enterprise of college football really is.
Exit Music: “Crazy” by Seal (1990, Seal)
I have often asserted in this space that Republican Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville is an idiot, and what do you know, this episode provides me with yet another opportunity to demonstrate that fact. Florida State’s exclusion has drawn the ire of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (who wants to sue, which, OK, I agree with DeSantis for once) and Florida Senator Rick Scott, who is wondering if Alabama’s multibillion dollar deal with ESPN may be behind their inclusion in the playoffs. Enter Tuberville, the former head football coach of, among other schools, Auburn. Tuberville doesn’t think an inquiry is necessary. “Ahh, that’s a waste of time,” he said, adding, “[The committee] went by the criteria of who played the toughest schedule — all the criteria that they had. There’s nobody more experienced to talk about this than me. I got left out in 2004 and we were undefeated. [The committee] did what they thought was right. You feel bad for Florida State. I do. I’ve been in their shoes.” But actually, no, he hasn’t been in their shoes. Tuberville did indeed coach an undefeated Auburn team in 2004. There were actually three major-conference undefeated teams that year (USC, Oklahoma, and Auburn) along with two other mid-major undefeated teams (Utah and Boise State). But in 2004, there wasn’t a playoff. Instead, the selection committee selected two and only two teams to play for the national championship, and they picked USC and Oklahoma. In such a system, Tommy, if there are three undefeated teams, one has to be left out. Tuberville can complain all he wants about being passed over for Oklahoma (who got crushed 55-19 in the championship game) but crucially, a one-loss team was not selected ahead of Auburn to compete in that game. Tuberville wasn’t screwed over in 2004 like Florida State was this year; he just drew the short stick. What an idiot.