Welcome to the day the College Football Playoff grew.
And also the sun that has proven once and for all needs to kick bowl games to the limit.
How cool is this game? So big that the Arizona State team held the nation for a few hours on Wednesday afternoon, bringing the feeling of March Madness to New Year’s Day for the first time in CFP history.
How confusing is this game? To confuse that, when Arizona State would end up playing one short game against Texas, the Rose Bowl could not delay the kick of Ohio State-Oregon even for a few minutes. And by the time Texas won its quarterback, 39-31 in the second overtime, the Buckeyes were up 7-0 and had the ball again.
We know the Rose Bowl loves the sun setting over the San Gabriel Mountains at the start of the fourth quarter, but come on. College football is the second most popular sport in the country. It needs to act like it and not leave its schedule to a group of free bowl managers who add nothing to the structure and fabric of the game in 2025.
College football is better than that. The Texas-Arizona State game proved.
Where do you want Alabama right now?
After intense hand-wringing about the shortcomings of the first cycle – led by cranky Kirk Herbstreit, of all people, they chose to talk and be wrong rather than reflect on his comments last week – it’s time to separate fact from fanfic.
- The CFP doesn’t need to expand to 14 or 16. Adding more teams would be a ridiculous waste of money, and no playoff-eligible team is left outside of the 12-team field. .
- Despite the sour grapes of Lane Kiffin’s social media, there was no magical football team that could have been plugged into the CFP to change the one-sided nature of most games played until now. Not Alabama, of course, after a no-show against Michigan in the ReliaQuest Bowl. Not in South Carolina. Not in Miami. And not Kiffin’s Ole Miss Rebels.
- The reason we’ve seen such an explosion in the CFP, even with the four-team format, is that there is a line that separates college football between the elite and the non-elite. It would be in the sport’s best interests to bridge that gap. How do you do it? By putting a non-traditional team like Arizona State on the national stage and letting them show how good they are.
- Yet college football has become so entrenched in the concept of culture that it has allowed the bowlers to control how their business is run. So we get empty seats at playoff games because fans can’t budget for three road trips, and we get the Rose Bowl kicking off another channel because a 15-minute delay could be the sacrifice of a day .
Here’s the thing: No one likes to complain about college football more than people who love college football, but their anger is often misplaced.
For all the hate directed at the NIL and portal environment, nothing in the history of college sports has done more to spread the talent and give more programs a chance to compete for something more important.
Despite all the calls for the CFP to include more “good” teams than qualified ones – as Herbstreit or anyone else can accurately define what that means – how do you define a deposed champion of Big 12 Arizona State to deliver one of the best performances of the underdog. in sports history when the elitists didn’t want the Sun Devils first?
It’s time to stop picking and let college football do its thing. Does that mean every game will be good? Does that mean that everyone on the bottom will look like they belong? Of course not.
But if you let the game breathe a little, the talent gap will continue to close and eventually you’ll get to a point where a game like Texas-Arizona State is more the norm than the exception. Even Boise State kept things interesting on Tuesday night, competing closely with Penn State for the better part of the game before falling 31-14.
That’s all you can ask for.
Should there be changes? Of course.
Oregon, as the No. 1 seed 1 and the nation’s only undefeated team, did not have to face Ohio State in the quarterfinals. That can be fixed by a small tweak that allows the CFP selection committee to rank teams by their actual rankings instead of prioritizing the top four conference teams.
There should also be a lengthy discussion about whether quarterback games should be held on campus as opposed to neutral sites. But no matter how that decision goes, it’s time for SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and their colleagues to make it clear that bowl games no longer have power over the sport. this one.
Consider the absurdity of this: Arizona State has a quarterback in its backyard with the Fiesta Bowl but is sent to Atlanta to play Texas. Meanwhile, Georgia has a quarterback spot in its own backyard with the Peach Bowl but is sent to New Orleans to play Notre Dame because of old contracts that tie certain conferences and bowls together.
Meanwhile, because the Rose Bowl is obviously supposed to start at 5 p.m. Eastern — and not a second later — many people packed into Wednesday’s best game didn’t even know Ohio State-Oregon was started. Talk about giving the fans the middle finger.
But for many years, instead of treating college football like a real game, the powerbrokers, the stooges of the head bowls have been in the perception of beauty sports. It’s about “creating matchups” and “brands” as opposed to, you know, playing games and showcasing new stars like ASU quarterback Sam Leavitt or coach Kenny Dillingham.
And guess what? In a real game, you can never predict when a game will be good or when it will end. Who would have thought that Arizona State would be Cinderella for a few hours in the New Year, when Oregon would fall flat on its face?
Lessons need to be learned at the Piach Bowl. Yes, the Big 12 may not be the biggest conference this year, but its champion beat the second-best team in the SEC. And although college football will never have the same power as the NCAA basketball tournament, it is the Arizona States of the world that will grow this game and turn the CFP into something of magic – if they leave it (too) alone.
That’s the ability we saw on Wednesday. That’s the balance that CFP can help you grow. It’s the thrill that fans have been longing for when they finally turn it into an invitation to the real Playoffs.
It’s time for even the skeptics to believe that this thing just works.
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