Charles Barkley is no stranger to speaking his mind. He did so with such regularity during his sixteen-year NBA career that he was able to parlay that into a successful post-playing career as an analyst for Turner Sports. And in the two decades since he retired from the NBA, Barkley hasn't limited himself to talking about the state of affairs in The Association. Sir Charles has been known to weigh in on both football and boxing, the two sports he claims are his favorites, and with such a controversial conclusion to the 2023 college football regular season, you knew it was only a matter of time before Barkley made his opinions on the matter known.

“Here’s my problem with the whole thing as a player, they penalize because they lost their starters,” Barkley during a college basketball broadcast on ESPN (h/t Nick Kosko of On3.com). “Winning with backups should have gave you brownie points, not penalize you. If we’re gonna play sports now where it only matters if you’re using your starters, I don’t want to be in that world. They won three games with a backup and another backup.”

Charles Barkley makes an intriguing point. If we're looking at degree of difficulty — which, whether the College Football Playoff selection committee wants to admit it or not, they do, because strength of schedule is part of the criteria they use to determine the four-team CFP field — then Florida State's wins on the road at Florida and in a neutral-site ACC Championship Game without Jordan Travis should mean something. Let's look at it this way: let's assume that Jordan Travis missed two games earlier in the regular season, but was healthy now. Let's say he missed Florida State's win on the road versus Clemson and their home win over Virginia Tech, and then returned to action. Wouldn't the CFP committee look at those two wins and say, “Wow, they won back to back games without Jordan Travis. This team is solid.”

Instead, the CFP selection committee has proven that they are not necessarily looking for the best body of work when putting together the four-team playoff field. They're looking for the four teams playing the best at season's end. And hey, that's fine, but there needs to be some transparency on their part. Just come right out and say “We're going to value the second half of the season FAR MORE than we value the first half,” and then everyone would've understood why Florida State was kept out of the College Football Playoff.

Despite his dissatisfaction with the way things went down, that hasn't stopped Charles Barkley from expressing interest in what could be the most wide-open College Football Playoff we've seen in it's ten-year existence.

“To be honest with you, I’m really looking forward to the playoffs now that I went on my rant. I have zero idea who’s going to win those two games because we got four elite teams and I’m gonna be watching.”

As am I, Chuck. As am I.