Brace yourselves: If College Football Playoff first round fails to deliver again, the pitchforks will be back out
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When the College Football Playoff’s 12-team format debuted last year, it was fair to characterize the first weekend as unremarkable.
To recap: Notre Dame jumped on Indiana in a game that was effectively over at halftime. SMU never got off the bus in a 28-point loss at Penn State. Clemson managed to hang around for a while but was ultimately no threat at Texas. And on a freezing night in Columbus, Ohio State’s march to a national title began with a 42-17 romp over Tennessee.
Four games. Four blowouts. And, as usual, no shortage of nitpicking from playoff expansion critics who were ready to pounce on the lack of drama across the first round.
So here’s fair warning as we head toward the second year of the 12-team playoff: It could very well happen again.
That’s not a prediction. Oddsmakers project Alabama-Oklahoma to be a close game. Miami-Texas A&M has the whiff of unpredictability. And who knows, maybe Tulane or James Madison can play like an NCAA basketball tournament underdog and put a scare into Ole Miss or Oregon, respectively.
But if the excitement of the first round once again fizzles, here’s some advice: Relax.
It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with college football’s postseason. It means college football’s postseason is … normal.
In the NFL last year, the average margin across its first-round playoff matchups was more than 15 points, with one good game out of six. In the NBA playoffs, there were two first-round sweeps and three 4-1 series. In the NHL, only two of the eight first-round series went to a Game 7.
Are any of those sports in a constant existential crisis over their postseason? Of course not.
This is the nature of tournament play in any sport where you include teams that don’t realistically have a chance to win the championship. Highly competitive first-round matchups are the exception, not the rule. Only when you reach the postseason stage where it’s best against best can you reasonably expect to see something memorable.
And even then, there are no guarantees because it’s sports and there’s nothing scripted about how anything will turn out.
College football’s default mode, however, always seems to be that something’s wrong unless you’re getting handed a one-score, fourth quarter, back-and-forth game with teams trading haymakers for three hours.
Not only is that unrealistic, it’s never been the norm in any form of college football’s postseason.
If you combine the Bowl Coalition/Bowl Alliance/BCS eras where there was an intent to pit No. 1 against No. 2 for the national title, the average margin of victory in those matchups was 16.3 points. Across those 22 years, there were only five championship games that would be considered classics: Florida State over Nebraska in 1993, Ohio State over Miami in 2002, Texas over USC in 2005, Auburn over Oregon in 2010 and Florida State over Auburn in 2013.
There were far more complete duds.
College football ginned up more misguided panic once it transitioned to the four-team CFP. In the first eight years of that format, only three of 16 semifinal games finished with a single-digit margin.
But then something happened on New Year’s Eve in 2022. Both semifinals came down to the last possession, with TCU upsetting Michigan and Ohio State missing a field goal as the clock struck midnight that would have taken down Georgia. And then the next year, Michigan’s goal-line stand against Alabama in overtime completed an all-time Rose Bowl, while later that night Texas barely missed on multiple shots to the end zone trying to score a winning touchdown against Washington.
Why did the drama quotient flip so suddenly? Maybe it was simply the law of averages. Perhaps it was NIL and the transfer portal beginning to spread talent around more evenly.
Either way, at the very moment the four-team playoff was coming into its own, the sport’s leaders pushed the button to expand.
Despite some loopholes in the selection process, largely caused by runaway conference expansion, it wasn’t the wrong decision. TV ratings for the first round were solid, despite blowouts and multiple games going head-to-head with the NFL. Two of the four quarterfinal games last season were very good. Both semifinals were highly compelling, coming all the way down to the end. And though Ohio State’s 34-23 win over Notre Dame in the national championship game wasn’t an all-timer, it was competitive for four quarters.
That’s all you can ask for.
Odds are, if the 12-team playoff is given a chance to breathe and grow, you’re going to see more competitive matchups over time. At some point, one of these Group of Five teams will knock off a blue blood and it’ll be the biggest story in American sports.
Just like a No. 16 seed beating a No. 1 in the NCAA basketball tournament, it's only a matter of time.
But College Football Inc. is always restless. Nothing is allowed a chance to breathe. If one of the powerbrokers gets sad because a team got left out, there’s an imperative to tear everything down to the studs and start over. Then the hand-wringing over blowouts — as if it’s even possible to avoid them — gets magnified.
(You can set your clock by the social media takes on Saturday pining for Notre Dame if James Madison is down four touchdowns against Oregon.)
Now, it seems, we’re already moving on to a 16-team playoff or perhaps something bigger. With all the grievances still lingering out there from the selection process two Sundays ago, there is renewed urgency among the conference commissioners to negotiate on an expanded format perhaps as soon as next year.
Why? Not really because of money, nor any expectation that the first-round games will be better if you expand to 16. It’s simply because the power conferences think more of their teams should be in.
Then, after the first year of the 16-team playoff, the cycle of angst starts all over again.
At some point, though, college football's leaders and its fans need to settle in and get realistic about what to expect from the playoff.
If it’s like every other sport with a large tournament bracket, blowouts are almost always going to outnumber competitive matchups in the first round.
Why is that so wrong?
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