College Football’s Final Four

The NCAA Selection Committee named the four teams that are going to be in college football’s playoffs and the results did not surprise me one bit. The selections of the Alabama Crimson Tide, the Oregon Ducks, the defending champion Florida State Seminoles and the Ohio State Buckeyes were the four teams they HAD to pick.

Everyone knows that this year, there were six teams that stood out as the best six teams in the land. The four they selected, and the TCU Horned Frogs and the Baylor Bears of the Big 12 Conference. College football has five, what they call, power conferences, the SEC or Southeastern Conference, the Big Ten (which has 14 teams, by the way), the Pac 12. the ACC or Atlantic Coast Conference, and the Big 12 Conference (which has only 10 teams, you do the math and figure that one). The four teams selected were champions of the power conferences that had playoff games to select their championship and these four teams won games over ranked teams from their conference that were also “division champions” of their respective conferences.

The two teams from the Big 12 conference, TCU and Baylor, were teams that played games on the last day of the regular season, but did NOT have a conference playoff. This is not because they didn’t want to have a conference playoff, but rather because the NCAA doesn’t allow leagues with less than 12 teams to HAVE a conference playoff. The Big 12 has had teams stolen from their league by the SEC (Missouri and Texas A&M), the Big Ten (Nebraska) and the Pac 12 (Colorado). They’ve added a few teams from elsewhere, but it is not their fault they didn’t have a playoff, but this argument was sure used against them in the selection process.

The committee picked Alabama because they were pretty much the consensus number one team in the country in all of the polls and won the very difficult SEC conference in an impressive manner. That they were selected AND that they were seeded number one did not surprise a single person in the entire United States. They DECISIVELY won their conference championship game 42-13 over SEC East champion Missouri, who was ranked 16th in the country at the time of the game, and they passed the eye test as to LOOKING like a champion.

Just as obvious to most people was the selection of the Oregon Ducks as the number two seed. They played in another very difficult conference, the Pac 12, which had at least eight strong teams that are going to get invited to bowl games. They soundly defeated Pac 12 South champion Arizona, a team who was ranked 7th going into the last game of the season, 51-13. This was a team that had defeated Oregon earlier in the season. In the eye test, Oregon also passed with flying colors, with many fans considering them a kind of number 1B (next to Alabama’s 1A) team in the country.

All Florida State has done, as defending national champion, mind you, is go unbeaten again this season, running their winning streak to an impressive 28 games in a row. In my entire history of watching college football, I have NEVER seen a defending champion go unbeaten one season, and be the ONLY team who is unbeaten the following season (and all other teams have lost at least once this season), and yet NOT be rated the number one team in the country. Even though they have been barely winning all of their games this season, they STILL have been winning them. The LEAST they should be ranked is as the number three seeded team. It would not be right, after barely beating a good Georgia Tech team in the ACC final 37-35, that the unbeaten defending national champs would not be ranked in the top three and allowed to defend their championship in this upcoming playoff.

So that leaves the fourth team out of the final four playoff spots that the committee still had to select. Ohio State just so happened to have had the same one loss status as the Baylor and TCU entries. But, OSU was going up against a #13 ranked Wisconsin team that had won its division in the Big Ten. They throttled them so impressively at 59 to nothing that the selectors had to give strong consideration to their dominant Big Ten Championship victory. The selection committee had to decide then if the Ohio State Buckeyes were a more representative team for the playoffs than TCU and Baylor.

Only, Baylor and TCU had overplayed their hands prior to the final weekend of the season. Convinced that someone amongst Alabama, Oregon, Florida State and Ohio State would lose, and it would be one or the other of TCU or Baylor that would make it into the playoffs, each team engaged in a media campaign for their own case to win out over the other for that coveted final spot. For whatever reason, TCU was rated number three in the country going into the final game, even though earlier in the year, they had lost to #6 Baylor by the remarkable basketball-like score of 61-58 (after trailing by 21 points in the fourth quarter). TCU was rated higher, and won their final game 55-3 over Iowa State (seriously, how can you be rated third, and win a game 55-3, and go DOWN in the rankings? – only in the world of NCAA Football, that’s how), so they argued THEY should be chosen. But Baylor had beaten TCU earlier, and they won their final game, so how in the hell could THEY not be rated ahead of TCU?

So, Ohio State won their game SO impressively, the Selection Committee had their solution to the problem. They could make a decision that would allow them to not be accused of favoring the higher ranked TCU over the team that beat them during the regular season. They could have the excuse of saying, “Oh, the two teams from the Big-12 could be overlooked due to the reason that THEY didn’t play in a conference championship game (even though the NCAA would not let them play a championship game), AND they could passively strike back at the two teams for playing their gamesmanship tactics against them. They could just say, “Hey, Ohio State was just TOO GOOD to not be selected,” as Ohio State simply PASSED the eye test even better than the other two teams.

So, Ohio State gave the selection committee its “politically correct” out. They HAD to be selected to make the committee feel like they did the right thing decision-wise that would pass the test of seeming credible in the face of public scrutiny, a task that was very important after all of the fiasco decisions of the lowly regarded BCS. Fans of Baylor and TCU will bitch and complain that THEY weren’t chosen, but the decision of picking Ohio State, to join Alabama, Oregon and Florida State, will ultimately be seen as being the correct choice.

As good as TCU and Baylor were, they were NOT good enough to be in the playoffs. In a beauty contest that rewarded the top four teams, they just happened to be teams five and six. And in no way would they have been selected in previous years that only rewarded the top two teams. At the end of the day, the four teams that HAD to be selected, were indeed the four teams that WERE selected. And they appear to the naked eye to also be the BEST four teams on this the last day of the season.