As I begin typing this blog entry, we are a little over an hour away from hearing the announcement from Oracle From On High, aka the College Football Playoff Committee, of the four teams that will comprise the College Football Playoffs for the 2017 season. Three of those teams will no doubt be Clemson, Georgia, and Oklahoma. The fourth will be either Ohio State or Alabama, and this debate is no doubt taking place even as I write this.
One thing is certain, and that is that for once, college sports did something right when they instituted this formal four team playoff format a few years ago. Think about it. Each season - I believe that this is the fourth year for the CFP - the Committee makes the announcement of its rankings along about the last weekend of October, updates it each subsequent weekend, and then endless debate and discussion takes place over whether or not this team can crack the Top Four, what has to happen for Giant State University to remain in the Top Four, what does Enormous Tech University have to do to crack the Top Four, and, wait, there is still a chance that East Overshoe University can make it if these six dominoes fall in exactly this order.
It is mechanism that is sheer genius in that it (a) gins up awareness and heated conversation about College Football for six consecutive weeks, and (b) when the season culminates with the various conference championship games, the system works itself out so that the four teams that make the CFP field are the teams who pretty much deserve to be there. There are some anomalies, of course. Last year, a two loss Penn State team won the Big Ten championship, and were left out, while Ohio State, who did not play in the Big Ten Championship, and who lost to Penn State, did. This year, it is two loss Ohio State who is the Big Ten champ. Will they make the CFP despite the precedent that was set last year? If they do, you will no doubt be hearing the screams of anguish from Happy Valley, i.e. tweets from James Franklin, along about 12:05 this afternoon. However, even if that fourth team pick - 'Bama or the Buckeyes - generates controversy, it is still great for the college game in that people will continue to talk about it, and talk and talk and talk, incessantly.
Of course, inevitably, this great mechanism will no doubt succumb to political and financial pressures, and the four team CFP will become an eight team CFP. Will debate about whether the eighth, ninth, or tenth best team deserves to be in the playoff be as interesting as the discussions of the fourth, fifth, or sixth teams are? Would Conference Championship Saturday be anywhere near as compelling if you knew that, hey, even the teams that lose will still make the CFP? I certainly don't think so, so I hope that the four team format endures, but we all know that money and, in particular, television money, will talk and integrity (to the extent that it exists at all in collegiate athletics) will walk.
Now, as to this season's Conference Championship Saturday, "compelling" was not exactly the word that I would use to describe those games. Three of the four games that mattered yesterday had final scores of 41-17, 28-7, and 38-3. The fourth game, Ohio State and Wisconsin, ended with a close score of 27-21, but if you watched it, you had no sense that Wisconsin was ever in that game at all. All of those games were really disappointing, and I bailed and went to bed last night midway through the third quarters of the ACC and Big Ten games. What a letdown. By contrast, the PAC-12 game, USC 31 - Stanford 28, played on Friday night, was a tremendously exciting game, but because of the way those previously mentioned dominoes fell throughout the season, it had no relevance to the CFP machinations.
We can only hope that the CFP games themselves, the semi-finals will be in the Rose and Sugar Bowls on New Year's Day, will be better and more entertaining than what we saw yesterday.
Okay, it is now 11:24 as I am about to wrap up this piece. I will call it now....the fourth team in the CFP will be.....the Crimson Tide of Alabama.
As always, watch but don't bet.
No comments:
Post a Comment