ATLANTA — At some point late Saturday night, or maybe early Sunday morning, the College Football Playoff selection committee will become relevant for the first time in 10 years.

They’ll actually have to make a tough decision.

Alabama? Florida State? Texas? There’s only going to be room for two of them.

Someone is going to be heartbroken.

Someone is going to be aggrieved.

Someone is going to be wronged.

If a circumstance like this had happened before, we’d have had a 12-team playoff by now. But a decade ago, the leaders of college football gave the committee a job. Now they finally need to do it—not with buzzwords or by hiding behind protocols,, but by making the most difficult call of all.

They need to actually pick the four best teams. And if they exclude Alabama after beating No. 1 Georgia, 27-24, they will have failed.

“The message I’d send is (to the committee),” Alabama coach Nick Saban said, “is that we won the SEC.”

A large part of the country reads that and rolls their eyes, which is perfectly understandable. The SEC beats its chest about winning 13 of the last 17 national championships, about the number of draft picks it puts in the NFL, about the largesse of its television contract,, and probably a dozen other things that grate on the nerves of fans in other conferences.

But leaving out an SEC champion? And not just any SEC champion but one who defeated teams ranked No. 1, No. 11, No. 13,, and No. 21 in the committee’s rankings this week? It’s impossible. On a a résumé, Alabama should be closer to No. 3 than No. 5—except for one problem.

On Sept. 9, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Alabama, Alabama lost 34-24 to Texas.

And so the question for the committee is this: Does one result matter more than Alabama’s superior body of work?

That’s a real philosophical debate. But it’s the one the committee is supposed to have. It’s why the committee exists at all. And when you factor in Florida State, an unbeaten ACC champion that was so unfortunate to lose quarterback Jordan Travis to a devastating injury just two weeks ago, it becomes a test for what people value.

Is it just going unbeaten? Is it having the most quality wins of all the playoff contenders? Or is it one game that was played nearly three months ago?

We’re about to find out.

“It was never supposed to be about undefeated teams,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said Saturday. “It was about a full evaluation of the season, and it’s never been about one week.”

Given the circumstances, you wouldn’t expect Sankey to spin it any other way. If roles were reversed, his opinion would undoubtedly be different. That’s just how the game is played.

But he is correct that when the playoff was created, the committee was not supposed to just automatically accept that an undefeated team was better than a one-loss team or that all one-loss teams were created equal.

The point was to debate the differences in schedules, to look at the quality of wins and the quality of losses, and to go deeper in the analysis than what this sport had become accustomed to in the era when poll voters determined who won championships