Former President Donald Trump claimed on Monday that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was to blame for Florida State being left out of the College Football Playoff.
The former president, who is leading in the presidential primary polls as DeSantis is currently in second place, made the remarks after the College Football Playoff selection committee selected the four teams that made the playoff: No. 1 Michigan, No. 2 Washington, No. 3 Texas, and No. 4 Alabama.
“Florida State was treated very badly by the ‘Committee,'” Trump, who is a resident of Florida, said. “They become the first Power Five team to be left out of the College Football Playoffs. Really bad lobbying effort … Lets blame DeSanctimonious!!!”
However, a report from ESPN said that the decision by the committee to exclude Florida State from the playoff had nothing to do with a lack of any sort of lobbying effort.
The committee’s decision took exclude Florida State came in-part due to how they struggled to beat Louisville in the ACC Championship Game, including struggling to even get first downs in the game.
The selection committee — which is comprised former coaches, players, sitting athletic directors and a former sports reporter — vote repeatedly “on the teams in small batches and continue through the process of voting and debating in groups until the entire list of 25 is compiled,” ESPN reported. “So it’s not as if they begin talking about Texas and Alabama and vote around them to make it fit. The only time the committee members know the vote is when it’s a tie, because they have to vote again.”
The report said that the longer the voting went on the more clear it became that Florida State would end up at No. 5 even though things got “heated” in the room.
“All of us had the emotional tie, like, ‘Holy s***, this is really going to suck to do this,'” one committee member told ESPN. “We talked about that over and over, and we just kept coming back [to] are they good enough with what they have to win a national championship, and it just kept coming back [to] we didn’t think they could.”
“People may not believe it, but we don’t say, ‘Oh gosh, if we vote this way, the SEC is going to be left out,” another committee member said. “That never came up. Ever. We literally look at teams, put them up against each other, and say, ‘Who did they beat? Who did they not beat? Who have they beaten on the road? What’s their strength of schedule?’ Look at the matrix and all the data.”