Not like this College Football, Not. Like. This.
The minute the SEC Championship game between Alabama and Georgia was over both CBS and SEC Network partner ESPN started ramping up the "Georgia" is one of the 'FOUR BSECT TEAMS" in the country nonsense. Of course, believing this required two things: 1. Ignoring that they just LOST the game that finished less than five minutes prior and 2. Ignoring that they lost to 3-loss LSU by 20 earlier in the year.
If you want to ignore the actual games, be my guest. At that point let's just call the College Football Playoff what it is and always has been: An invitational that considers potential TV revenue and the sticker on the helmet more than the actual record. Then we can treat it like a clown-show and go back to enjoying college football the old way.
But, the College Football Playoff Committee, in a rare moment of something close to sanity, chose 1-loss OU for their coveted #4 spot. That's better than Georgia of course, OU only lost previously to Texas, a loss that they avenged on Saturday while Ohio State worked hard to beat Northwestern, and then started relying on a win against Penn State as their closing argument.
Of course, all of this ignored the elephant in the room: UCF.
Which, ironically, is what the CFP is designed to do, ignore outright the Group of 5 schools. In any other sport there being 4 undefeated teams remaining at the end o the regular season would lead to said four teams being natural fits in the 4-team playoff. Not in college football however. In college football we have Strength of Schedule, we have the vaunted "eye-test" and we have Kirk Herbstreit, ESPN and CBS running around telling everyone that UCF just "doesn't match up" with the big boys in college football. It's a broken system that's thrusting sticks into the spokes of the greatest sport on Earth and it's starting to have an effect.
The negative effect is most visible in the vaunted "New Year's Six" bowl games. Let's take a quick look:
Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl: Florida (9-3) vs. Michigan (10-2)
Playstation Fiesta Bowl: LSU (9-3) vs. UCF (13-0)
Rose Bowl: Washington (10-3) vs. Ohio State (12-1)
Allstate Sugar Bowl: Texas (9-4) vs. Georgia (11-2)
Goodyear Cotton Bowl: Notre Dame (12-0) vs. Clemson (13-0)
Capital One Orange Bowl: Oklahoma (12-1) vs. Alabama (13-0)
I'm not going to go through these games individually here, but I am going to mention that three SEC teams were given nods into the games, this despite in many cases, going no better than 6-3 against quality Power 5 competition. Meanwhile Washington State gets left out, despite going 7-2 against the same.
"The SEC is just playing the game better than anyone else" supporters will say, and they're correct on that. By only playing eight conference games and allowing schools to play multiple cupcakes in their non-conference the SEC both pads their records, and receive some gaudy scores to sway the uninitiated to their superiority. They're also smart enough to care about the meaningless bowls, and rarely don't show up. This doesn't stop their supporters from claiming they didn't care when they LOSE (As did Auburn to UCF last year) but it provides them a baked-in argument when they eke out a win against a middling team from another conference.
The Pac-12, B1G and ACC all have legitimate gripes against the current system however, as the SEC gets at least two nods (Florida and LSU) that they should not have.
Now, granted, the ACC went and shot themselves in the foot this year, with both Syracuse AND NC State blowing late games they should have won, but the PAC-12 had Washington State sitting out there with a 10-2 record looking all the world like a playoff team.
The Texas inclusion (9-4) is strange as well. Given that they were beaten by West Virginia, Oklahoma State and Maryland prior to losing to OU in the championship game. THIS is a NY6 bowl team?
So, the system is broken, the games are a mess and we're not getting close to seeing the matchups that we want to see. The Group of 5 teams are left on an island no matter what they do, and a single conference is getting a much larger than it's proportionate share of the big-money games despite not having the quality wins to show for it.
In addition, gone are the traditions of the traditional bowl tie-ins (save for the Rose Bowl thank goodness, which still matches up the B1G and PAC-12 Champions) and gone is much of the history, pageantry and tradition from the game.
In it's place we get a smarmy Kirk Herbstreit lecturing us on the "BSECT Four Teams" while suggesting that the results don't matter and CBS prostrating themselves in front of the SEC praying silently that they don't look elsewhere for their broadcast rights. We've turned College Football into a season of "Who's Line is it Anyway?" without Drew Carey. In his place we've put Kirby Horcutt and a bunch of prune-juice slurping ADs who are really just doing what their SIDs tell them to do. We're not allowed to see, hear or read about the discussions but we're promised that they are intelligent, deep and thoughtful.
I've seven seen SEC(!) partisans suggest that these are "10 of the best minds in college football"
Seriously? THIS Group?
In fact, the ONLY thing this group is successful at is allowing some low-functioning idiots to write some words and allow excluded fan-bases to be aggrieved.
And we think the solution to this is to allow MORE of it? Eight teams instead of four? It was four instead of two that was supposed to fix things. It's made it worse.
At this point the entire mess can only be saved by scrapping it and returning to the old bowl/poll system. If we're going to have to live through the insufferableness of sports media today, at least let's do it where several teams get to make their case.
Hell, we could have argued all year whether Alabama or UCF deserved the title, IF 'Bama wasn't granted false legitimacy in a rigged system last year that is.
Blow. It. Up. It's really the only way.
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