College Football Playoff remains playground for elite through four seasonsDan Wolken, USA TODAY
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When Alabama was selected to last year’s College Football Playoff despite failing to win the SEC and possessing zero wins over top-15 teams, it confirmed that the so-called playoff is really more of an invitational.
And the message to national championship aspiring programs couldn’t have been more clear: Elites only, please. Insurgents need not apply.
In the end, Alabama made the decision non-controversial. It beat ACC champion Clemson in the semifinals and SEC champion Georgia in the championship game, allowing the CFP selection committee to beat its chest once again about “getting it right” as Nick Saban hoisted the trophy for a fifth time in the past nine years.
But the lasting impact of 2017 will be the feeling that for all the changes in college football to supposedly make the game more equitable, the traditional powers have only strengthened their vise grip on future titles.
In four years of the Playoff, four teams make up 11 of the 16 appearances: Alabama 4, Clemson 3, Ohio State and Oklahoma 2.
And as the 2018 season begins, it would not be a mild surprise if the four teams involved in the next Playoff don’t come from among that group again. Each are ranked in the top five of the preseason Amway Coaches Poll.
No. 4 Georgia is one of five teams - along with Oregon, Florida State, Michigan State and Washington - to make the field.
The pool of gate-crashers seems narrow at the moment. Certainly you could see an Auburn making the Playoff; a Miami or Notre Dame perhaps. If Southern California ever got its act together, it could represent the Pac-12. Maybe someone from among Michigan, Penn State or Wisconsin can figure out how to not only beat Ohio State in the Big Ten but avoid other losses. If Texas ever gets back to being Texas, certainly the Longhorns could join Oklahoma as a playoff-level program.
But as the committee showed us last year, its mind-set is oriented toward pedigree, which means the benefit of the doubt is going to go to the programs that look like they could actually win a title over the ones that might be more deserving based on résumé.
Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
Nobody disputed scrappy, overachieving Michigan State making the 2015 Playoff because it had won the Big Ten, somehow going on the road and defeating a stacked Ohio State team head-to-head. But there was never a sense that the Spartans stacked up talent-wise enough to seriously threaten in the Playoff, a theory that was proved correct when they lost 38-0 to Alabama.
Same thing with Washington in 2016, which had done nothing wrong during its regular season but played a weak non-conference schedule and didn’t have to deal with a Pac-12 that was particularly strong. In the semifinals that year, the Huskies got an early touchdown on Alabama and couldn’t do much else in a 24-7 loss.
And this past year, the only realistic alternatives to Alabama would have been Southern California (a weak Pac-12 champion that never got much consideration), Ohio State (a pretty good team with a really, really ugly loss to Iowa the committee couldn’t get over) and unbeaten Central Florida out of the American Athletic Conference. Odds are, none of those three teams would have done what Alabama did in the Playoff, suffocating an excellent Clemson team and then having the depth to make adjustments and overcome Georgia in the final.
But that’s not the entire point here.
You’d be a fool to deny how it touched a nerve with the public that UCF, which went on to beat Auburn (the team that handed Alabama its lone loss) in the Peach Bowl, didn’t even get seriously considered by the selection committee.
Some of the outrage was a direct result of UCF aggressively branding itself “national champions,” paying out national championship bonuses to staff members, raising a national championship banner and even getting a special license plate commissioned by the Florida legislature, all things that created conversation and got people to dig their heels in on one side or the other.
But for a large number of college football fans, particularly outside the SEC footprint, there was also a very real question about the justice of it all. When you don’t even consider a team that won all of its games regardless of the schedule and instead give the final spot to a team that didn’t even win its division, much less its conference, that looks less like a playoff and more like a beauty pageant.
But at least now, the veneer is of for good. Whereas we suspected in Year 1 of the Playoff when Ohio State got the nod over TCU and Baylor that elite name brands would be the tiebreaker, we know it for sure now.
While there was little reason on paper to pick Alabama based on its collection of mediocre wins, the committee’s default setting was to reward the more established championship-level program over the Cinderella.
And that’s fine in a purely subjective process that doesn’t really pretend to be anything else, but it does raise a question about what it’s going to take for an outsider to win this thing.
Over the years, college football has been particularly unkind to upstarts, whether it was the great Boise State teams being unable to really crack the national championship picture or Alabama getting a few more votes than Oklahoma State to land in the 2010 BCS title game opposite LSU. Generally, if there’s a tough call to make, the blueblood has always gotten the nod.
That’s part of the reason why you have to go back to Florida in 1996 to find the last first-time national champion.
So it’s never really been equal opportunity, but at least when the Playoff began, there was a notion that adding to the postseason might lead to a little more chaos where a non-traditional team could stick its nose in and seize opportunity. Instead, it feels like the divide between the haves and have-nots has only hardened.
