The first thing we learned from the opening round of the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff is there really aren’t 12 teams good enough to compete for a national title.
Indiana, SMU, Clemson and Tennessee were all sizable underdogs in their first-round road games, and all proved they weren’t up to the task of competing on the big stage. That led to four boring games in which the announcers spent much of the fourth quarter rationalizing the losing teams’ presence in the CFP and overhyping the teams that handily beat them.
Going from four teams to 12 was always a stretch. Six teams, with two getting first-round byes, would have sufficed. Eight teams, with no byes, would’ve been OK. But 12?
Well, money talks, and it never shuts up when it comes to college football.
And despite all the blather ESPN and TNT delivered in their pregame shows, on which breathless analysts suggested the expanded playoffs was the greatest thing to happen to college football since Red Grange, the games had the feel of another bowl game once the novelty of playing in a non-bowl stadium wore off.
In fact, the CFP organizers should’ve just replaced other bowls for first-round action, utilizing the lesser ones already in place that exist for the sole purpose of creating more revenue for Disney Co. and other TV network owners.
Notre Dame-Indiana might have made a decent Sun Bowl matchup, replacing wind-chill factor with the actual sun and Touchdown Jesus with Tony the Tiger.
Ohio State-Tennessee, a matchup of Power Two powers that couldn’t even make their own conference title games, would’ve been a perfect Citrus Bowl, in which Big Ten and SEC wannabes always meet.
Texas-Clemson would’ve felt right at home in the Pop-Tarts Bowl, with Matthew McConaughey eating the Pop-Tart mascot after the Longhorns won while mumbling, “All right, all right, all right.”
Penn State-SMU, the least interesting matchup of the four first-rounders, would have been more appropriate for the long-defunct Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl, which featured a team from Texas against an out-of-state team whose fans traveled well.
Alas, we can only dream.
Instead we got overkill about the weather, Penn State coach James Franklin practicing his indefensible decision-making in big games and overrated quarterbacks such as SMU’s Kevin Jenkins, Indiana’s Kurtis Rourke and Tennessee’s Nico Iamaleava stinking up the joint.
Oh, by the way, did you know it gets cold in late December in the Midwest?
Next week’s quarterfinals should provide much better games and a real playoff-type atmosphere for viewers in warm-weather sites and domed stadiums. But we’ll see.
At least they’ll all be played in the bigger, traditional bowls — Rose, Sugar, Fiesta and Peach — and on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Bowl games before Christmas simply lack the aura of the end-of-year and start-of-year games. The NFL even scheduled two games Saturday opposite the CFP, undeterred by the competition.
Two of the lower-seeded quarterfinalists began the week as considerable favorites, with No. 6 seed Penn State a 10 1/2-point favorite over third-seeded Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl and No. 5 seed Texas a whopping 13 1/2-point favorite over fourth-seeded Arizona State in the Peach Bowl. You can pencil in Penn State and Texas for the semis, which shows how ludicrous the CFP seeding process is and should lead to changes next year to ensure the four most dominant teams get the first-round byes.
The most interesting game figures to be Ohio State-Oregon in the Rose Bowl, a rematch of the Big Ten thriller in October in Eugene, Ore., where Buckeyes quarterback Will Howard slid a tad too late at the gun to deny his team a shot at a potential winning field goal in a 32-31 loss.
