Welcome to the day the College Football Playoff grew up.
And also the day that proved once and for all it needs to kick the bowl games to the curb.
How great is this sport? So great that an Arizona State team held a nation spellbound for a couple of hours on Wednesday afternoon, bringing a March Madness feel to New Year’s Day for the first time in CFP history.
How frustrating is this sport? So frustrating that while Arizona State was ultimately coming up one play short against Texas, the Rose Bowl couldn’t see fit to delay the kickoff of Ohio State-Oregon by even a few minutes. And by the time Texas had won its quarterfinal, 39-31 in the second overtime, the Buckeyes were already up 7-0 and had the ball again.
We know the Rose Bowl loves its sunset over the San Gabriel Mountains at the start of the fourth quarter, but come on. College football is this country’s second-most popular sport. It needs to act like it and not leave its programming schedule to a bunch of freeloading bowl bureaucrats who add nothing to the texture and fabric of the game in 2025.
College football is so much better than that. The Texas-Arizona State game proved it.
Where’s your pining for Alabama now?
After all the agenda-fueled handwringing about the first-round mismatches — led by cranky Kirk Herbstreit, of all people, who chose to be loud and wrong rather than reconsider his biases last week — it’s time to separate fact from fanfic.
The CFP does not need to be expanded to 14 or 16. Adding more teams would be a cynical money grab, and no Playoff-worthy team is getting left out of a 12-team field.
Despite Lane Kiffin’s social media sour grapes, there was no magic bullet team that could have been plugged in to the CFP to change the one-sided nature of most games that have been played so far. Not Alabama, certainly, after its no-show against Michigan in the ReliaQuest Bowl. Not South Carolina. Not Miami. And not Kiffin’s Ole Miss Rebels.
The reason we have seen a lot of blowouts in the CFP, even in the four-team format, is that there’s a dividing line in college football between the elite and non-elite. It would be in the best interests of the sport to shrink 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.
And yet college football is so wrapped up in the idea of tradition that it has let bowl operators dictate how to run their business. 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 on an alternate channel because delaying by 15 minutes would be a sunset sacrilege.
Here’s the point: Nobody likes to complain about college football more than people who love college football, but often their angst is misdirected.
For all the hate directed at the NIL and transfer portal environment, nothing in the history of college sports has done more to spread out talent and give dozens of programs a chance to compete for something significant.
Despite all the calls for the CFP to include the ‘best’ teams over the most-deserving — as if Herbstreit or anyone else could accurately define what that means — how do you explain dismissed Big 12 champion Arizona State providing one of the best underdog performances in playoff history when the elitists never wanted the Sun Devils in the first place?
It’s time to stop nitpicking and let college football do its thing. Does that mean every game is going to be great? Does that mean every underdog is going to look like it belongs? Of course not.
But if you just let the sport breathe a little bit, the talent gap is going to continue to close and you’re eventually going to get to a place where a game like Texas-Arizona State is more the norm than the exception. Even Boise State kept things interesting Tuesday night, competing credibly with Penn State for a good portion of the game before falling 31-14.
That’s all you can ask for.
Should there be some tweaks? Of course.
Oregon, as the No. 1 seed and the nation’s only unbeaten team, should not have had to face Ohio State in the quarterfinals. That can be fixed by a small tweak that allows the CFP selection committee to seed the teams by their true rankings rather than giving priority to the top four conference champions.
There should also be a lengthy conversation about whether quarterfinal games should be on campus rather than neutral sites. But regardless of 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 the bowl games have no leverage anymore over this sport.
Think about the absurdity of this: Arizona State has a quarterfinal site in its backyard with the Fiesta Bowl but gets shipped to Atlanta to play Texas. Meanwhile, Georgia has a quarterfinal site in its backyard with the Peach Bowl but gets sent to New Orleans to play Notre Dame because of old contracts that tie conferences to particular bowls.
Meanwhile, because the Rose Bowl apparently has to kick off at 5 p.m. Eastern — and not a minute later — most people wrapped up in a truly great game on Wednesday didn’t even know Ohio State-Oregon had started. Talk about giving the fans a middle finger.
But for so many years, rather than treating college football like a real sport, the powerbrokers, talking-heads bowl stooges have been in the beauty pageant mentality. It’s all about “creating matchups” and “the brands” rather than, you know, playing games and showcasing new stars like ASU quarterback Sam Leavitt or coach Kenny Dillingham.
And guess what? In a real sport, you just can’t predict when a game is going to be awesome or when it’s going to end up lopsided. Who could have guessed that Arizona State would be Cinderella for a few hours on New Years, while Oregon would fall flat on its face?
Lessons need to be learned from the Peach Bowl. Yeah, the Big 12 may not have been a great conference this year, but its champion went blow-for-blow with the second-best team in the SEC. And even though college football is never going to have the same upset dynamics as the NCAA basketball tournament, it’s the Arizona States of the world that are going to grow this sport and turn the CFP into something magical — if they’ll just leave it (mostly) alone.
That’s the potential we saw on Wednesday. That’s the parity the CFP can help grow. That’s the excitement fans yearned for when they finally turned it from an invitational into a real Playoff.
It’s time for even the skeptics to admit that this thing is working just fine.