After First-Round Blowouts, College Football Playoff Primed for Intrigue

Yes, the games were bad and the format needs work, but the 12-team tournament is a major improvement over its predecessors.

Ohio State safety Caleb Downs celebrates with a rose after the first-round College Football Playoff win because the Buckeyes will face the Oregon Ducks in the Rose Bowl. / Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Now that everyone has defrosted from a frigid wipeout weekend, let’s examine what we learned about the first round of the new, 12-team College Football Playoff.

Start with this: The games were bad, the format needs work, but the overall concept remains a major improvement over the four-team playoff and its predecessors. This expansion of the tournament was overdue to happen, and the benefits were apparent.

On-campus games are fantastic additions to the postseason. They are a reward for having a good season and a continuation of the atmosphere that makes the sport special. Plus, the home-field advantage definitely helped the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, Penn State Nittany Lions and Texas Longhorns win and advance. (The Ohio State Buckeyes were unbothered by what was nearly a neutral-field setting, an interesting development in its own right.) When the SMU Mustangs had multiple pre-snap penalties while trying to run red zone plays in front of the Penn State student section, the tactical advantage of home field was on display.

Bringing the elements into play in South Bend, State College, Pa., and Columbus, Ohio, only reinforced the regional flavor of the sport, diversifying from the climate-controlled domes and perma-warmth of many bowl locales. All weather is football weather, and these were some of the coldest games in the history of the college game. Winter football has a cherished place in the lore of the NFL, from the Ice Bowl of 1967 to the AFC championship game of ’81 to the tuck rule game of 2002 and beyond. Now college football has a chance to build some of that same history.

And while competitive balance was not achieved, with the four games being decided by an average of 19.3 points, the playoff games provided an opportunity for more good teams to play more meaningful games. Think of this: In a four-team playoff world, Ohio State would have been out of the national title chase—now the Buckeyes look like they might be the justifiable favorite to win it all. Lacking access to the playoff, they would have been half-heartedly preparing for a hollow bowl game with a dozen or more players opting out. Same with Notre Dame, which instead could very well find itself playing in the semifinals or beyond.

Don’t listen to the revisionist grumps who are insisting that the old ways were better. Most of the teams we saw playing over the weekend would be going through the motions this month. Instead, we got more impactful postseason games than ever.

That doesn’t mean they were good games, though. They weren’t. This is a byproduct of a few things:

Blowouts happen in football. They happened in the four-team version, too. These were semifinal results from that 10-year era: 

• Oregon Ducks 59, Florida State Seminoles 20
• Alabama Crimson Tide 38, Michigan State Spartans 0
• Clemson Tigers 31, Ohio State 0
• Clemson 30, Notre Dame 3
• LSU Tigers 63, Oklahoma Sooners 28 

A couple of championship-game scores: 

• Georgia Bulldogs 65, TCU Horned Frogs 7
• Clemson 44, Alabama 16 

The Nebraska Cornhuskers once beat the Florida Gators 62–24 in the BCS championship game.

Second, the last few teams into this year’s field were flawed throughout the season and flawed in the postseason. That shouldn’t have come as a shock. Many of us were declaring that there weren’t 12 great teams out there—and there rarely are. But providing more opportunities for more teams to play for something is a good thing, even if it doesn’t uniformly produce good games. (Think what you would have been watching—or not watching—this weekend in a four-team playoff world: the likes of the New Mexico Bowl, the Las Vegas Bowl and the Rate Bowl.)

Third, the seeding is an issue that needs to be addressed. A couple of top-four teams that should have had a first-round bye were instead matched up with the two lowest-seeded teams—No. 11 seed SMU at No. 4 Penn State and No. 12 seed Clemson at No. 3 Texas. If the Nittany Lions and Longhorns had been given bracket placement commensurate with their rankings, the Arizona State Sun Devils and Boise State Broncos would have been playing this weekend and we might well have had two fewer blowouts.

Automatic byes for four conference champions is nice in theory, but in practice it has produced an uneven bracket that unfairly penalizes some top teams. 

Big Ten champion and No. 1 seed Oregon now must face an Ohio State team that should have had a top-six seed and be on the other side of the bracket. Southeastern Conference champion Georgia must face Notre Dame and then possibly Penn State to reach the championship game. Meanwhile, the teams they beat to win those leagues—Penn State and Texas, respectively—will be double-digit favorites in their quarterfinal games against Boise State and Arizona State.

Those top four seeds also are deprived of the same home field advantage teams seeded five through eight enjoyed. Oregon, the only undefeated team in the nation and the undisputed No. 1 seed, should be hosting Ohio State in Eugene, Ore., instead of playing them amid a 50-50 crowd split in the Rose Bowl. Georgia should be getting Notre Dame between the hedges in Athens, Ga., not in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans.

Fixing the seeding will be easier than fixing the home field situation for the quarterfinals. College football’s bowl addiction was on clear display after each of the first-round games, when bowl officials appeared at postgame news conferences to awkwardly present “invitations” to their games. That’s a relic of the past, but the sport can’t seem to quit outsourcing some of its biggest games to third parties in faraway lands.

Yes, a lot of fans enjoy a winter getaway to Southern California, Arizona or South Florida. But the games are more accessible and affordable for more fans of the higher-seeded teams when played on campus. All the better teams should reap the rewards for their season by having that home-field advantage, not just those who failed to get a first-round bye.

Issues with seeding and quarterfinal venues aside, the next round should be pretty juicy.

The Georgia–Notre Dame Sugar Bowl—a distant rematch of the 1981 game in that same locale that led to the Bulldogs’ second national championship—is a brand-name, story line-intensive whopper. How Georgia fares against the elite Irish defense with backup quarterback Gunner Stockton is the primary plot. This is an instance when having that first-round bye, and more than three weeks between games, is a big benefit for the Bulldogs. They can put Stockton through starting QB boot camp to get him ready. For the Irish, their quest to win the biggest games they play continues—beating the Indiana Hoosiers was great, but the Sugar Bowl is the kind of yardstick matchup where they have fallen short for roughly three decades.

The Rose Bowl gets a throwback traditional game with a former Pac-12 program in Oregon against the oldest of old-school Big Ten programs in Ohio State. It also might be an earlier-than-ideal showdown of the two best teams still playing. Oregon won a 32–31 classic in October that went down to the final minute; this one could do the same. The Ducks’ journey in search of the first natty in school history is hardly a smooth road. 

Boise State and Penn State both get a chance to relive peak past glories in the Fiesta Bowl. That’s where the Broncos earned their biggest win in history, taking down Oklahoma 43–42 in overtime with a stunning succession of trick plays—capped off by a Statue of Liberty dazzler for the walk-off win. Penn State returns to the desert where it won its last national championship, in the 1986 season, upsetting Miami in the Fiesta—in what was college football’s first real attempt at creating a stand-alone championship game. The game was moved from New Year’s Day to Jan. 2 to heighten the exposure and double down on the idea that the winner would be the undisputed national champion.

Arizona State vs. Texas in the Peach Bowl gives the least-likely playoff team, given preseason expectations, its shot at a blueblood that came into the season with national title aspirations. The Sun Devils were picked to finish last in the Big 12 and instead won the thing, building momentum and confidence as their 11–2 season went along. Now we’ll see if they’re ready for a major step up in degree of difficulty, or whether they’ll look like one of the other major underdogs did in the first round.

The 12-team College Football Playoff should only get better from here. But even if the first-round games weren’t good, the product is still an improvement over what we had before.