The ending to the 2023 season still stings for Georgia coach Kirby Smart.

The Bulldogs won their first 12 games of the season, with 11 coming by two scores.

Georgia was a dominant team. But in the age of a four-team College Football Playoff, a single loss proved to be enough to upend your season.

That loss came in the SEC championship game against Alabama, which dropped Georgia from first to sixth in the College Football Playoff rankings.

“That’s a tough one. Two-time national champ, back-to-back, go undefeated and lose one and you’re out,” Smart said. “It’s funny because people say the precedent’s been set and you can’t play in that game and slide out of the playoffs. And I said, oh, yes you can. It happened. It was only a four-team playoff, but it did happen, so it makes it tough.”

The 2023 season wasn’t the only time the Bulldogs have slid out of the College Football Playoff picture during conference championship weekend. It happened again in 2018 and 2019.

The Bulldogs are the only SEC team to make the College Football Playoff in both seasons since it expanded to 12 teams. Georgia will be expected to do so once again this coming season, as Smart has put together one of the more talented teams in the country on paper.

But as seems to be the case on an annual basis, making the College Football Playoff requires a bit more than just winning games on the field. There’s politicking involved.

And that’s something that Smart takes issue with.

“I’m not here to decide how many teams should be in it,” Smart said. “I would much rather talk about how the teams are decided that are in it.”

While many have pondered about the proper pool of College Football Playoff teams, Smart knows that won’t be decided this week. The Big Ten, ACC and Big 12 have all pushed for 24 teams. Smart himself has been vocal about having an expanded College Football Playoff field, though he hasn’t specified whether it should be a 16 or 24-team field.

In multiple interviews this week, Smart has sympathized with the College Football Playoff committee for the job they have to do. Someone is always going to be upset as the fifth, 13th or 25th team in the rankings.

Instead of focusing on the proper size, Smart has voiced his concerns about those in the room making decisions on which teams get into the field.

“I’m more interested who’s on the committee,” Smart said in an interview with the Paul Finebaum show. “Who’s controlling the conversations, and how much of the metrics playing into it versus the conversations, the eyeball test, they say, you know, because I’m like, okay, what does this committee consist of? How much football do they know? How much football do they watch?”

Of the 13 members of this upcoming year’s College Football Playoff committee, six are athletic directors, four are former head coaches, two are former college football players and one is a former sports writer.

Only three of the 13 have ties to the SEC and one of those is Gus Malzahn, a longtime rival of Smart’s. It should be noted though that Virginia athletic director Carla Williams previously worked at Georgia before taking her current post.

It’s impossible to ignore the biases that come into play with 13 decision-makers.

“That’s what’s concerning to me,” Smart said. “I don’t know how much people move. I’m not in that room, you know. I don’t have a lot of input on how things go down and what decisions are made.”

Smart vocalized the problems that come with subjectivity in comparing teams. It won’t always be as easy to look at head-to-head in terms of deciding who gets in. Even last year, there was contention between Miami and Notre Dame, even with the Hurricanes beating the Fighting Irish on the field.

That conversation would’ve been ramped up another level had Texas finished at 10-2. But thanks to losses against Ohio State and Florida, in addition to a 35-10 defeat against Georgia, the Longhorns weren’t as big a part of the conversation.

“We hear about stacking teams, you know, head-to-head,” Smart said. “That makes perfect sense. But then after head-to-head, it goes to all these other metrics or conversations controlling the room. And I think that’s what the great debate is in the college football, which makes it interesting. It also makes it hard to pinpoint or tell teams why they didn’t get in.” 

Smart isn’t alone in vocalizing his frustrations with the College Football Playoff committee. His athletic director, Josh Brooks, touched on many of the same talking points when he spoke to reporters this week.

“It’s all going to come down to the 9-3 versus 10-2,” Brooks said. “We all see it coming, so when that SEC team is 9-3 versus another conference team 10-2, that’s the great debate and how we’re weighing a team that could have a third loss because of a nine-conference game.”

Smart and Brooks both believe the strength of the SEC is not properly being factored into the College Football Playoff rankings. That’s even with getting five teams into the field last year and a 10-2 Vanderbilt getting left out.

It’s a difficult job to select the best teams in the country to play for the College Football Playoff. Georgia just wishes a better and more transparent job is done in selecting those worthy teams.

“They’ve got a hard job, so whether it’s 12, 16, 24, or four, there’s always been a great debate of who was left out,” Smart said. “It’s interesting when you look at the numbers of the teams last year that it came down to. Everybody’s got a really good argument for why they should have been there.”