There will be plenty to miss when college football undergoes myriad changes next season.
A traditional Pac-12. Regional conferences and rivalries. The Rose Bowl kicking off on New Year’s Day, just about the time the New Year’s Eve hangover fades away.
A College Football Playoff with not enough spots to accommodate deserving teams? Good riddance.
“I hear a lot of the controversy about who should have been in and who shouldn’t have been in it,” Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh said on ESPN. “It’s going to be fortunate that next year there will be an expanded playoff and a true champion. It’s just going to be better,”
The final version of the four-team playoff produced a truly unsatisfying outcome Sunday when unbeaten Florida State was left out because, essentially, its starting quarterback got hurt.
Top-ranked Michigan will face Alabama at the Rose Bowl in one Jan. 1 semifinal and Washington meets Texas in the other at the Sugar Bowl.
Florida State was bumped to the Orange Bowl, where it will face two-time defending national champion Georgia.
It was not so much that the 13-member selection committee got it wrong by putting Alabama in over the Jordan Travis-less Seminoles. It is difficult to argue the Seminoles in their current state are better than any of the four playoff teams. Alabama or Texas would have been deservedly frustrated if they had been snubbed.
Still, keeping Florida State out feels worse. Cold. Almost heartless.
Travis posted an apology on social to his teammates for being injured. Florida State coach Mike Norvell said he was “disgusted and infuriated.”
“What is the point of playing games?” he said.
The four-team format always felt like a half-measure, the next step in the evolution of the postseason after the Bowl Championship Series — but not a real solution.
It generally did it’s main job — crowning a champion — fairly well in part because over the 10 years the CFP has been in the place there has been a consolidation of power at the very top of college football.
Most years, only two or three teams were real threats to win a national title. But the CFP devalued the rest of the postseason: Highly ranked teams left out are tossed into what are sold as marquee bowl games — the New Year’s Six — but with low stakes and limited reason for the best players to play.
College football will never eliminate player opt outs or interim coaches in bowl games. But the four-team model severely marginalizes really good teams that deserve better.
