It’s beyond regarded to think you’d rather be the 5 than the 1 or 2 at this point.
Look around at the parity in college football this year and imagine being so stupid that you’d rather play 2 elimination games instead of 1.
With so many teams losing, no one has any fucking clue how they’ll value a championship game winner like asu or Boise vs the group of Tenn, Miami, IU, SMU (if Clemson wins the acc), Bama.
It’s perfectly reasonable to think Bama gets in as the 12 seed if asu gets a bump from 16 to 13 this week and then from 13 to somewhere above 12 after getting the championship game win.
So not knowing how the committee may or may not punish championship losers, it is the height of stupidity to think it would be better to roll the dice on getting into the 5, 6, or 7 seed playing who the fuck knows, instead of preferring to earn the 1 or 2 seed in a bye.
but hey. At least you’d be in the same page as Kiffin, so that’s something.