College Football

After years of controversy, the College Football Playoff is here

Tradition can be beautiful. It can be a wondrous chain, linking generations of people who never will meet, connecting children and grandparents and total strangers.

But tradition also can smother possibility, creating contentment with a walkman when an iPod is readily available.

For more than a century, college football created too many questions and too much frustration in the name of tradition. Despite thousands of games each season, the best team in the country was not always revealed, leading championships to be split, or picked by writers, coaches and Richard Nixon. Somehow, the NCAA didn’t mind being the only sport to ignore the only tenet of sports that matters — may the best team win. Too often, the best teams never played each other.

“There’s no question that was amazingly frustrating,” said Chris Hill, Utah’s longtime athletic director, whose teams went undefeated twice in the past decade but were excluded from the national title game.

Finally, after the small step taken by the 16-year run of the BCS, the long-awaited College Football Playoff is here.

Hill never will know how the school’s undefeated teams in 2004 and 2008 — which finished fourth and second in the final polls, respectively — would have fared, but the school’s success, along with programs like Boise State, helped give the public what it has wanted for years.

“Because of our performance years ago, and some other teams, I think it just brought it up more and more,” Hill said. “I was optimistic there would be something like this.

“I think it’s a nice transition from where we were. It was a good response without going overboard.”

Whatever tradition was lost was eased by the roughly $470 million annual payout from ESPN for broadcasting rights. Though the five power conferences will earn far more money over the 12-year deal than the other leagues, Marshall athletic director Mike Hamrick already is excited at the potential for a smaller school to have its best chance to play for a national championship.

“Just like the Cinderella team in college basketball, now we can have a Cinderella team in college football, which we’ve never really had in the past,” Hamrick said. “I’ve been to many Final Fours, and when there’s a Butler there or a Wichita State there, you can just feel a different buzz in the air.”

The biases of a subjective 13-person committee, though, make Hamrick realize his school’s talented team could win every single game and still lose in the end.

“Does a 12-0 Marshall team get ranked ahead of an 11-1 or 10-2 SEC team?” Hamrick asked. “That’s going to be up to the committee.”

Former Colorado quarterback Joel Klatt said he thinks one of the more interesting byproducts of the introduction of the playoff is that more high-profile coaches will be fired, now that there is a “clear metric” for success, but for smaller schools, he believes the ceiling is just about the same as it always has been.

“This is the greatest myth of the college football playoff committee, that it is open to everybody,” said Klatt, a college football analyst for FOX Sports. “The fact that they have put this term that we’re going to put the best four teams, rather than saying we’re going to take the four most deserving teams, is going to allow them to say that a two-loss team from a major conference is better than an undefeated team from a non-power five conference.

“Marshall’s probably going to be undefeated, but I don’t think there’s any shot that Marshall makes the playoff. Are they gonna have one of the four best seasons? Probably. But are they one of the four best teams? Probably not.”

With the final spot potentially coming down to second-place power-conference teams, being weighed against each other without having played each other, the answers at the end of the season won’t be much easier than most seasons.

But after so many years of debate and head-scratching, the playoff finally is here. So much is so uncertain, but one thing remains from the old era:

“If there’s not controversy over these four, I’ll be shocked,” Hill said. “I don’t see any way around it.”

Creating a playoff

Here’s how college football’s new playoff format will work:

  • The four teams will be decided by a 13-person committee, which includes multiple athletic directors, Archie Manning, former Nebraska coach Tom Osborne, former USA Today sportswriter Steve Wieberg and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
  • The criteria for choosing the playoff teams is much more subjective than the BCS. The committee will factor in conference championships, records, strength of schedule, conference strength, head-to-head results and scoring margin, among other factors. The four “best” teams will be selected.
  • No team will receive an automatic berth and there is no limit to how many teams can advance from a single conference.
  • The committee will release a weekly Top 25, beginning Oct. 28.
  • The semifinals will take place on New Year’s Day, hosted by the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl. The top seed will be given the site closest to its home. The semifinal sites will rotate every year between the six biggest bowl games — Rose, Sugar, Cotton, Orange, Fiesta and Peach.
  • The National Championship will be held on Jan. 12 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. The site is chosen through by a bid process, similar to the Super Bowl. Glendale, Ariz., will host the game in 2016 and Tampa, Fla., in 2017.
  • Having signed a 12-year deal with ESPN, the four-team College Football Playoff will be in place at least through 2025-26.

What might have been

Here’s a glimpse at what a four-team playoff might have looked like since 2010, based on BCS* rankings, along with what actually happened in the single title game

2013

1. Florida State (13-0) vs. 4. Michigan State (12-1)

2. Auburn (12-1) vs. 3. Alabama (11-1)

Actual: Florida State beat Auburn, 34-31 for title; Alabama lost to Oklahoma, 45-31, in Sugar Bowl; Michigan State beat Stanford, 24-20, in Rose Bowl

2012

1. Notre Dame (12-0) vs. 4. Oregon (11-1)

2. Alabama (12-1) vs. 3. Florida (11-1)

Actual: Alabama beat Notre Dame, 42-14 for title; Oregon beat Kansas State, 35-17, in Fiesta Bowl; Florida lost to Louisville, 33-23, in Sugar Bowl

2011

1. LSU (13-0) vs. 4. Stanford (11-1)

2. Alabama (11-1) vs. 3. Oklahoma State (11-1)

Actual: Alabama beat LSU, 21-0 for title; Oklahoma State beat Stanford, 41-38 (OT) in Fiesta Bowl

2010

1. Auburn (13-0) vs. 4. Stanford (11-1)

2. Oregon (12-0) vs. 3. TCU (12-0)

Actual: Auburn beat Oregon, 22-19, for title; Stanford beat Virginia Tech, 40-12, in Peach Bowl; TCU beat Wisconsin, 21-19, in Rose Bowl