Dan Wetzel blasts Kirby Smart, college coaches for CFP ranking reactions: 'Biggest pack of complainers in history'

As college football’s playoff has expanded, the number of arguments over who should be ranked where have not gone anywhere. If anything, college coaches have more to find fault with than ever.

ESPN’s Dan Wetzel recently joined the College GameDay Podcast and opened fire on their complaints. To him, they ring a bit hollow, particularly when it comes to week-to-week gripes with the selection committee’s rankings.

“The No. 1 thing, coaches’ favorite thing to do, is preach that you should overcome adversity,” Wetzel said. “And then they complain about adversity. The biggest pack of complainers in history. They whine and they cry, ‘Oh my God, we’re getting cheated.’ They don’t really understand the formula.”

There are some nuances to the College Football Playoff selection process, to be sure. One thing that came under fire (perhaps rightly) a year ago was the seeding process. That is being changed.

But there are other elements that are just part and parcel of having a selection process. Wetzel pointed to college coaches like Kirby Smart as being overly combative about the rankings.

“I mean last year, I think it was Kirby Smart, I don’t want to pick on which guy, and they all do it, so I don’t want to just cite out Kirby, but, ‘We just need more coaches that understand the SEC on the committee,'” Wetzel said. “OK, the four coaches we had and the four players we had, counting Warde Manuel, who was also the AD at Michigan, they don’t know ball. OK, like, we had to make sure there’s an SEC guy on there. The committee’s already too big. Somebody’s got to sit around and make a call: Play ball. You’re in, you’re not in.”

For Wetzel, the issue with college coaches is that there’s always a complaint. Expanding things likely won’t make a difference.

“You hear it in the men’s basketball, there’s 68 teams and someone’s whining,” he said. “And they just had a conference tournament where every team had a chance to play their way in. So March Madness is really like 360 teams large, because you can lose every game in most leagues, get in, and then just keep winning, you win the national title.”

Wetzel’s primary complaint seemed to be that college coaches will never be fully satisfied with the system in place. He summed up his argument on the podcast.

“So there’s so many options, they just complain, ‘What is this?’ They can’t control it, they complain about what they can’t control and they are paranoid beyond belief,” Wetzel said. “I thought Greg Sankey had an interesting line about Deloitte and the whole new NIL rules. You can’t sit in this committee and say you want rules and then immediately in board meetings or coaches’ meetings say we want rules… and we give you rules and you go out and say, ‘We’re not going to follow it, no one’s following it, this is garbage.’

“There should be a little bit of like, ‘Hey, this is the system, we accept.’ But very few coaches are going to do that.”