On to 2025

It doesn’t take long for sports to make an impact in any new year, and January and February are the months for the college and NFL post-season, and championships.

The Super Bowl winner will be crowned early February, so now the fun is just beginning.

There’s plenty of weeks left for the pros, but the “collegians”, who make a ton of money and can pick up and leave for greener pastures at their whim, are in the midst of the expanded 12-team tournament.

There’s already been grumbling about how the whole thing was put together and the predictable cries of who never should gotten in and who never should have been left out.

Alright, grumbling is putting it mildly. The football community is incensed.

I say they’re on the money about one aspect of the playoffs, but off the mark on another complaint.

The first round featured four games that were hardly contested.
Ohio State, Texas, Penn State, and Notre Dame breezed to blowout victories to advance to the quarterfinals to face the four teams who won their conference championships and didn’t have to play in the first round.

There was no excitement in any of the games, really, and if the college playoff committee wanted to build the drama moving along, they fell flat on their faces.

College football is filled with lopsided results all season.

That’s nothing unusual.

But you don’t anticipate those kind of games when the supposed 12 most deserving teams are getting down and dirty battling for the big prize.

Still, there is never a guarantee that any matchup will be a classic nail-biter and down-to-the-wire skirmish. It’s just possible that the winners in four games will dominate.

Of course, the onus is always on the team that didn’t bring their A games, or in some of the cases, didn’t bring their B or C games either.

Could it be that the above mentioned quartet did bring their best and ultimately wiped out their opponents?

Whenever people talk about how THEIR team didn’t bring the goods, I always quote, the late, great, NBA coach and General Manager Red Auerbach.

Red, at one point, guided the Boston Celtics to 11 world titles in 13 years.

He once told me, “Remember, it’s not solitaire out there”.

It’s not solely about how your team played, your opponent had something to do with it too.

So I disregard the second-guessing of the likes of head coach Lane Kiffin of Ole Miss, one of the outsiders looking in.

Kiffin ripped the playoff committee for including Indiana, which got crushed by Notre Dame, and then SMU, which was demolished by Penn State.

Said Kiffin, “Way to keep us on the edge of our seats Committee….riveting”.

Obviously, the head coach thought his Rebels should have been in the field, not  to mention Alabama, South Carolina and Miami.

Ole Miss, ‘Bama, and South Carolina lost 3 games, while Miami dropped only two, but their last one was a brutal defeat at the hands of Syracuse.

Look, you can argue the number of losses, blowout defeats, and strength of schedule till dooms day, but decisions have to be made, and there will always be cases made for teams on the fence.

Where I believe the committee may have to go back to the drawing board is about the choice of the four teams receiving byes, or automatically advancing to the quarterfinals.

It was decided that the four major conference champions would get a pass to the second round.

I think this is where they made a mistake.

The four teams receiving byes should have been the four schools deemed the strongest in the field. Yes, that’s a committee decision, but it’s no different than March Madness. Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian came out in favor of that plan.

In college hoops, conference champions are automatically in the 68-team field in the battle for the national basketball championship.

But then, the committee seeds the 16 teams in the four regions.
The other four competing are the last ones out, but still involved in a play-in to join the bracket.

There are always arguments about the seedings, but they are just that, a formula for ranking teams in each region to establish the pairings.

There is no way Arizona State and Boise State should have been amongst the four not to play an opening round game, thus becoming one of the top four seeds in the college football playoff.

As you read this, both teams will have played or are playing.

If one or both win, you’re having a huge laugh at my expense.

But that’s alright. I still believe what I say.

You had to include Ohio State among the top four. The Buckeyes lost to undefeated Oregon and then to their hated rivals, Michigan, in a huge upset to end the regular season.

Texas dropped two games to Georgia, and Penn State only lost to Oregon and Ohio State.

How does Oregon, Penn State, Ohio State and Texas sound for the schools who should have avoided first round play?

Three of them had to play.

Something’s wrong there.

How about Oregon having to face Ohio State in a quarterfinal matchup.

That’s absurd.

If that confrontation was for the National Championship few would complain.

This all may be a one-year furor.

I see changes coming to the college football playoff format next season.

On to 2025.

Happy New Year to all!