Kirby Smart believes Alabama, South Carolina and Ole Miss were all among the best teams in the country and should’ve been included in the College Football Playoff.

The Georgia coach, who met with the media at SEC Spring Meetings on Tuesday, compared the college football postseason to that of other college sports.

“I look at women’s softball,” he said. “I look at men’s basketball, and I look at men’s baseball. It just absolutely blows my mind how the SEC can end up with the teams they end up with in those positions, OK?”

A record 13 SEC baseball teams were selected to compete in the NCAA Regionals. Fourteen league teams were selected for the softball postseason. The SEC also had 14 teams in this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament, an all-time record for any conference.

“Now, some of those you can say are play-in, because maybe they went through a regional, and you look at the women’s softball World Series,” Smart said. “You look at men’s baseball. You look at men’s basketball, 13 of 16, 14 of 16, and they’re larger pools. But when you look at what they’re able to do, and there’s no outcry, and there’s nobody beating the drum saying that it’s completely unfair, they do a lot of things based on RPI, they do a lot of things based on strength of schedule, and there are reward teams for that.

“I have a hard time seeing Ole Miss, Alabama, and South Carolina not being in the best teams last year, and that, for me, is a big part of the SEC. People want to say, ‘Well, you need to play nine games. You need to play eight games.’ We don’t really know which one of those is until we know the playoff format.”

Alabama, for example, lost three games last season, against CFP entry Tennessee, while Vanderbilt and Oklahoma were devastating loses.

SMU, which fell in the ACC championship game and to BYU, made the field ahead of all the three-loss SEC teams.

Mark Heim is a reporter for The Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Mark_Heim. He can be heard on “The Opening Kickoff” on WNSP-FM 105.5 FM in Mobile or on the free Sound of Mobile App from 6 to 9 a.m. daily.