At times like this, it’s important to remember that college football’s default state of being is outrage, not satisfaction or joy. This is a feature, not a bug. This disharmony is often portrayed as a problem, but don’t be fooled — chaos is the sport’s brand, the chilled shrimp that keeps bringing fans back to the buffet. Always has been, always will be, whether it’s dressed in leather helmets or in the kind of runway wardrobes that seven-figure NIL quarterbacks can afford. College football (the sport itself, not its overlords) keeps both its teams and its fans engaged in argument, and it sells like free lunch. And here we are again.
The Brand New Version of the College Football Playoff (en route to the Brand Newer Version, on the road to an imagined NFL-style Super Bowl perfection, after which nobody will argue, but instead call into Paul Finebaum to tell him how delightful it all was. Sure.) launched this past weekend on four campus sites, the first-ever college home-field post-season games and the latest-ever games on hallowed ground in South Bend, State College, Austin and Columbus. That ambience was fabulous, an unqualified win. And as NBC Sports’ Nicole Auerbach urged this past weekend, top seeds like Oregon and Georgia deserve the same experience (and, let’s be honest, the same advantage).
The football: Not so much. The host teams all won, by an average margin of almost 20 points. The viewing was worse than the arithmetic — a series of lopsided blowouts that triggered immediate malevolence toward the CFP selection committee (and, of course, what would any college postseason in any sport be without malevolence toward some committee? Suits!). Alabama should have been in! Mississippi should have been in! South Carolina should have been in! (Notice a pattern? Keep reading).
There’s no sense in spending too many keystrokes arguing that these games were better than the reaction. They weren’t. But the committee couldn’t have known that Curt Cignetti, who coached Indiana to an 11-1 record, would inexplicably kick a field goal, down 14-0, on fourth-and-four from the Notre Dame 16-yard-line with 3:26 left in the first, which, given the flow of the game, was a face-saving concession of sorts. His decision to punt on fourth-and-11 from the Note Dame 48 with 10:34 to play, down 20-3, was a straight-up, keep-it-close white flag. Hey, Indiana did not play a strong schedule and Notre Dame is good. But had either of those fourth downs resulted in a first down (or more), you’ve got a more entertaining product for a few minutes. Had they not, you’ve got… what you got.
And while the committee could have known that two-loss SMU would have troubles against Penn State (or anybody), it couldn’t have known that sophomore quarterback Kevin Jennings, a good and resourceful football player, would struggle so badly. (The ancillary lesson from Jennings’s meltdown might be this: College football home field is a much bigger advantage than NFL home field — the size and scale of the stadiums, the emotion of the crowds. It just means more. Etc.) Had Jennings thrown two early incompletions instead of two pick sixes, the game stays a little closer a little longer.
Had Clemson punched in a touchdown to get within 38-31 midway through the fourth quarter, the final televised half hour of its game with Texas plays out more compellingly and leaves a better taste for everyone not wearing burnt orange.
You could say all of this is tinkering on the margins to make a disaster look merely unpleasant. Fair enough. It was a tough start. But back to the beginning of this column: College football has made a lucrative business model out of turning grievance into content. It happened in real time on Friday and Saturday, not least with the very practical notion that had the committee made first-round matchups based on seeding, the games might have been more competitive: Notre Dame (5) – Clemson (12), Ohio State (6) – Arizona State (11), Tennessee (7) – SMU (10), Indiana (8) – Boise State (9). This isn’t perfect, either. You have Indiana getting a home game, and while the first weekend might have been more dramatic, there is the risk of blowouts in the quarterfinals.
But guess what. There’s that risk, anyway. And there always will be, because of the inherent power imbalance in college football.
The CFP exists ostensibly to decide a national champion “on the field.” That is partly true. It also exists because playoffs are lucrative in our big-event culture. Hence, what college football (the overlords, not the institution) is doing is trying to create December Madness and January Madness. To be fair, any sport at any level that crowns a champion is trying to emulate the NCAA Division I basketball tournament and its combination of Cinderellas, titans, and buzzer beaters, packaged in a three-long-weekends format that is almost perfect entertainment for the masses… with only the college basketball regular season as a casualty. (College football’s regular season, once a procession of do-or-die games, has also been devalued, but profitably replaced by giant conferences and endless Big Games, which the public has decided is an acceptable trade).
Stepping back for a beat: College football has been crowning national champions of one form or another for well more than a century. For a very long time, that champion was decided by polls, which was silly and corrupt, but against all reason, often did an inexplicably good job of getting the best two teams together within 24 hours of New Year’s Day. It was a sketchy system that worked as often as not. Over time, desperate commissioners and bowl officials sought to better control that system, leading to the reviled BCS, which also often worked, but was on life support from shortly after it was born. Madness was desired and Madness is here. This is a good thing, but also messy.
The biggest problem is obvious and insurmountable: College football is not college basketball, for a thousand reasons. Basketball is loosely egalitarian, whereby a couple hot-shooting wings can trigger a massive upset. Football is sprawling and militaristic (by design) and the most creative spread offenses and RPOs sprung from the minds of the most diabolical offensive geniuses won’t change the basic truth that football is a game of land acquisition and manpower, and those massive upsets will be very rare (although not unheard of; looking at you, App State). Even if Kevin Jennings had played cool in State College, SMU was eventually losing that game by double digits.
Herein lies the barrier to the truly enthralling tournament that college football (both the overlords and the institution) seeks: The sport has always been relentlessly top heavy. In 2000, when I had been covering the sport for more than a decade, including seven years for Sports Illustrated, I wrote a misguided think piece arguing that college football was suddenly a wide-open enterprise. I proposed the headline: ANYBODY CAN WIN NOW. This was after Virginia Tech and Michael Vick improbably reached the de facto national title game the previous year. To support my theory, I checked in with some coaching titans: They told me, nah, that’s not right, it’s still big boys with an occasional outlier. That has proven mostly true. Alabama, Georgia, Michigan. And so on. (TCU in 2021 would be that occasional outlier and we know how that went).
But that inequality means that while taking a chance on SMU or Indiana makes for a fairy-tale bracket, it risks what happened last weekend. But is it more practical to just start by picking the top six teams in the SEC? For some fans, absolutely it is. It’s being debated as you read this. These issues will intensify if the CFP is expanded to 14 or 16 teams when the reality is that only three or four teams in any given season are capable of winning the national championship and only a handful of others are capable of keeping a quarterfinal game close. And you don’t even want to think about the 1-16 game. But slow down. This is Year One. Give it time to find buoyancy. Audiences adapt to what they love.
And remember: The soul of college football is disagreement; its lifeblood is imperfection. There is also this: On New Year’s Day, Arizona State plays Texas and Boise State plays Penn State. Two Cinderellas. If one (or both?) wins, the narrative shifts. If they both get trounced? No worries. The sport has been effectively balancing controversy and competition for century and proven resilient. This is all new, but also not new at all.
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