When the first round of this year’s NBA playoffs had just one seven-game series, with most of them ending in blowout fashion, you didn’t hear basketball fans lament the inclusion of the New Orleans Pelicans, Phoenix Suns or Miami Heat.
When the Miami Dolphins and Pittsburgh Steelers got blown out of the NFL’s wild card round last year, you weren’t bombarded with complaints about how expanding the playoff to 14 teams had ruined the product.
When runners from Peru and Uzbekistan failed to finish the Olympic Marathon earlier this year, there were no calls for more Kenyans and Ethiopians to take their place.
Sometimes you wonder if people who follow college football know that it’s a sport. And what we do in sports is set the parameters for how you determine a championship and include teams or individuals based on a set of qualifications that are predetermined to honor the results of a regular season — not a recruiting class, a program’s brand name or what the bookmakers think about hypothetical matchups.
In other words, calm down everyone. As of Friday night when we watched the first game of a 12-team playoff, college football became a real, big-boy sport with an actual postseason.
When it’s real, you get what you get — and sometimes that’s a lopsided competition.
Guess what? That was the case when the College Football Playoff was four teams. That often be the case now that it’s 12. And it will certainly be the case if it expands to 14, 16 or whatever number of teams you want to include.
So why it does it seem like everyone’s so angry that Notre Dame was a lot better than Indiana, Penn State was a lot better than SMU and Texas was a lot better than Clemson?
BIG MISTAKE: Indiana should never have been in the playoff field
By the way, those are all things we knew for weeks and weeks as this season unfolded. Really, what did you expect?
If you have a grievance about the way teams were selected and the first-round mismatches that occurred as a result, the blame should not go to the selection committee. They were just doing their job, exactly the way the conference commissioners intended when they expanded the playoff.
It included teams from five conferences, four time zones and 10 states. It highlighted some of the sport’s most elite and historic brands while also showing the country that there is value in rooting for schools that aren’t traditionally in the mix for national championships. And at the end of the day, as we get deeper in the playoff, the games are probably going to get tighter and the best team is going to emerge with the trophy.
But more than all of that: This is all really good for college football. Why is that not enough?
If the leadership of college football is going to take one weekend of blowout games and decide they’ve done this all wrong, then they don’t understand why they did this in the first place.
There isn’t now, has never been and never will be 12 college football teams capable of winning a title. Who cares?
That is true of every great sporting event from the Kentucky Derby to Wimbledon to the World Cup. Not every entrant really has a chance, and many of them will get beat — badly. Why is it only a problem in college football?
If it were up to Lane Kiffin, this would be a beauty pageant, not a competition. The Ole Miss coach spent part of his Friday evening and Saturday afternoon sending social media shots at the selection committee because the games weren’t good while his team that certainly had enough talent to participate will instead spend New Year’s in Jacksonville, Florida getting ready for Duke in a game nobody really cares much about.
But Kiffin’s team went 9-3, was the only SEC team to lose to Kentucky and completely choked on Nov. 23 against a 7-5 Florida team when a playoff berth was within reach.
All things being equal, would you pick Ole Miss to beat Indiana, SMU and maybe a few others who made the field? Probably so, and you’d likely have a whole lot of committee members agree with that. Same with Alabama, South Carolina and even Miami, which had arguably the best quarterback in the country and could have certainly put up some points against anyone who played a first-round game this weekend.
But that’s not the committee’s job, and part of the confusion is a simple lingo problem.
The CFP has always said they evaluate the season and pick the “best” teams, but that’s not exactly true. Their job is to take the criteria given to them by the conference commissioners and pick the teams that best meet that standard.
Classic example: In the second year of the CFP, defending national champion Ohio State was clearly the “best” team in the Big Ten and would have been equipped to play against anybody in the field. But Ohio State’s only loss that season was kind of a fluky bad performance against Michigan State, so what was the committee supposed to do? Pick the “better” team or the team that won the game that mattered, even if we could reasonably predict that Ohio State would beat them the next five times they played?
Michigan State wasn’t even competitive in the semifinals that year, and Ohio State may well have won the national title if it got in. But there wasn’t room for the Buckeyes, so the committee honored the regular season — which is exactly what would happen in every other sport we have.
No reasonable person would deny that the SEC is the best conference with the most talent. But when you don’t perform in 25 percent of your games — including some truly bad losses like Ole Miss’ toe stub against Kentucky or Alabama getting pounded by the worst Oklahoma team of the century — you don’t have much to complain about.
College football’s leadership always talks about having the regular season in sports. If you take a team like Ole Miss and not an Indiana, which went 11-1 in the Big Ten without a bad loss, you aren’t preserving the sanctity of the regular season. You’re spitting on it.
The Indiana issue is symbolic of what’s happened to college football. A year ago, you’d have looked at a Big Ten schedule that included Michigan, Washington, Ohio State and Nebraska and said that was as tough a run as just about anyone in the country. How could you possibly have accounted for the two teams that played for last year’s national championship falling apart?
With an 18-team Big Ten, a 17-team ACC and a 16-team SEC, there will probably always be a team or two that runs off a great record because by random chance they avoided some of the better teams in their league.
And guess what? That team is almost always going to make it in because that’s how playoffs work.
If you can’t live with that — especially in a 12-team model that ensures the participation of every true contender — maybe you don’t love this sport as much as you think.In the first decade of the CFP, 19 of the 30 games were blowouts or mismatches. But if you set up a narrative where every team that got smacked around by a better team didn’t deserve to be there, then let’s just go back to the BCS.
It wouldn’t be good for the sport of college football, but it would certainly save the middling and underachieving like Ole Miss and Alabama from a nasty case of FOMO.