The clock struck midnight on Ohio State’s season at exactly midnight on New Year’s Eve, ending the greatest day in college football playoff history. Georgia rallied from a 14-point fourth quarter deficit in the Peach Bowl, and Ohio State’s field goal attempt to regain the lead in the dying seconds went left around 11:59:59 a.m. – the ball fell at the same time as the dropped ball.
By request, here’s the multicam view of the radio call feed from Times Square, All-22 and ESPN, Georgia and Ohio State, as it happened on the live screen: pic.twitter.com/k775T4VNTo
—Timothy Burke (@bubpaprog) January 1, 2023
The first eight years of the college football playoffs provided few competitive semifinals. It looked like this year would be no different: Georgia and Michigan were both undefeated and both favored by a touchdown. But for the first time in the playoffs’ existence, both games went to the wire. Ohio State nearly handed the defending champions their first loss since last year’s SEC title game, and TCU beat Michigan in a 51-45 thriller with 69 second-half points.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen eight hours of football so entertaining. From the Fiesta Bowl kickoff at midnight, we saw 22 touchdowns and even more momentum changes; There were times when I felt like each of the four teams was destined to win the national championship. Some people went to parties on New Years Eve. They should have stayed and had fun.
TCU’s victory changed the narrative around its playoff appearance from aww, that’s cute that the horned frogs did it to Oh shit, can they win this thing? The Horned Frogs beat Michigan, not just on offense, but with two defensive touchdowns and three goal-line positions. (Yes, there was defense in a game with almost 100 points scored.) And Michigan crushed Ohio State in Columbus in November, and Ohio State hung with the champions national titles until the end of 2022.
No team like this team TCU has already won a championship; The Horned Frogs were chosen to finish seventh in a 10-team conference after going 5-7 last year and had odds of 200-1 to win the title. And no program like TCU has won in a long time – it was once somewhat possible for secondary programs like BYU or Colorado or Pitt to squeeze in a national championship here and there in the day when the polls decided the champion. But now you actually have to beat the other top teams in the sport, which ultimately boils down to the same few five-star mega-programs.
When the college football playoffs began in 2014, they promised big games between the sport’s top teams and a widened path to winning a national championship. It is not delivered. Of the first 16 semi-final matches, only four were decided by less than 17 points. Only Ohio State’s seven-point victory over Alabama in January 2015, a Georgia-Oklahoma classic in the Rose Bowl after the 2017 season, and the Justin Fields-Trevor Lawrence game in the 2019 Fiesta Bowl were competitive. We’ve had some fun National Championship matches, but year after year the semi-finals have been stunning, with the sport’s top two teams quickly establishing themselves as significantly better than their opponents.
The playoffs have led to the wheat being separated from the chaff – and, quite frankly, the wheat is boring when all you get is wheat every year. Basically only blue bloods in college football have made the playoffs – and on the rare occasion that someone like a Michigan State or Cincinnati snuck in, they were quickly knocked out in some of those blowouts we just came across to speak. In a best-on-best playoff system, teams loaded with five-star megatalents usually win. Of the first 16 berths in the College Football Playoff National Championship game, Alabama got six, Clemson got four, Georgia and Ohio State got two each, and LSU and Oregon each got one. The biggest upset in a semifinal was Ohio State in 2014, which beat Alabama as 10-point underdogs with third QB Cardale Jones forced out through injury. . When Ohio State is your biggest underdog, you don’t really have an underdog.
It’s only fitting that TCU became the first real underdog. In 2010, the Andy Dalton-led Horned Frogs went 12-0, dominating the Mountain West Conference, winning most of their conference games by 20 or 30 points. It was good enough to finish third in the BCS system, but of course there were only two spots in the BCS National Championship game. The Horned Frogs beat Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl, finished the season undefeated, and that was it. Sure, they may have lost to Cam Newton’s Auburn team, but they never even had a chance. They were the poster children for the small but sweeping decision to expand the playoffs from two to four.
Now, college football is gearing up to triple that move, expanding the four-team playoffs to 12. The first eight years of the college football playoffs gave little reason to believe it would be a smart move. There seemed little need for more blowouts, and little evidence that the 5-12 teams could seriously alter the championship picture. It was a financial decision disguised as football.
But this year’s playoffs showed us that an underdog can make it to the final game. that games featuring the biggest and best programs in sport need not end in crushing, lopsided defeats. As the clock strikes midnight in this era of college football, there is hope.
0 Comments