ESPN insider: SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey 'will lose his mind' if Alabama misses CFP again

Alabama was the first team out of the field last year for the 2024 College Football Playoff. Now, for the sake of fans in Tuscaloosa as well as the Southeastern Conference, the Crimson Tide will be expected to return to it in Year Two under Kalen DeBoer.

Paul Finebaum and Heather Dinich began the morning with some bold college football takes on ESPN’s ‘Get Up,’ including what a successful season would be for Alabama in 2025. Finebaum began, simply saying the Tide needed to be in the Playoff after just missing last season in DeBoer’s debut.

“Making the College Football Playoff,” Finebaum said on ESPN2. “Everybody in the world knows what happened last year. They missed out with the debacle at the end of the season. (DeBoer) has done an amazing job recruiting. In fact, he’s done it at a level that it very close to what Nick Saban did at times. But, if he doesn’t make the Playoffs, the pressure will intensify. He won’t be fired. He is still in rather good stead because of the recruiting but he needs to make the CFP.”

However, if Alabama misses out again for the second time in as many seasons of this new tenure, Dinich thinks that puts even more at stake for the SEC, including conference commissioner Greg Sankey. It’d be one less team from the league in the field for the second year of the 12-team format, which caused quite the controversy last seasn when three of the first four teams who were out out were three-loss SEC teams.

“SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey is going to lose his mind because, if (Alabama does) not make the Playoff, it’s probably because they’re going to be a three-loss team, which happened last year and, if you remember, Alabama was the committee’s highest-ranked three-loss team, from the SEC,” Dinich said. “They were excluded because they had to make room for another conference champion.”

Alabama went 9-3, eventually finishing the year at 9-4 overall with a loss in the ReliaQuest Bowl, last season in their first season under DeBoer. They were in Playoff contention throughout but fell out of favor with three SEC road losses at Vanderbilt, Tennessee, and Oklahoma to finish at No. 11 in the final CFP rankings. But following the inclusion of the ACC and Big 12 champions, both of which were ranked behind the Tide, Alabama became the first team out of the newly expanded field.

Whether playoff-or-bust or national title-or-bust, Alabama once again enters a season with heightened expectations. That said, if they were to again miss the CFP, those at the league office in Birmingham could end up being as unhappy as those down in T-Town.