Four Takeaways for College Football Playoff Semifinals

Either Marcus Freeman or James Franklin will become the first Black head coach to make an FBS national championship game, and other story lines to watch in the Orange and Cotton Bowls.

Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman has made history in the College Football Playoff. / Amber Searls-Imagn Images

Four takeaways on the College Football Playoff Final Four:

1. For the first time in FBS history, a Black coach will play for a national championship.

Either Marcus Freeman of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish or James Franklin of the Penn State Nittany Lions will make that history. Their teams meet in the Orange Bowl semifinal, with the winner advancing to the title game Jan. 20.

Those two have actually already made history as the first Black coaches in the CFP. And now they’re both 2–0, with the Irish routing the Georgia Bulldogs Thursday in the Sugar Bowl and the Nittany Lions doing the same to the Boise State Broncos on Tuesday night in the Fiesta Bowl. 

That it has taken this long to get to this milestone moment is stunning. It’s also frankly embarrassing for the sport. The number of Black head coaches at the FBS level remains disproportionately low in comparison to player participation, and the number of Black head coaches who get the best jobs is also low.

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(The Southeastern Conference, for example, currently has zero Black head coaches. It also has zero of its traditional members still in the playoff, with only the first-year arrival Texas Longhorns representing the league.)

Franklin, age 52 and in his 11th season at Penn State, has been knocking on the door of this kind of season for a while. Freeman, age 38, is just ascending. Both have had to endure their share of criticism—Franklin for not winning the biggest games, Freeman for not winning the easy games. But the critics are running out of ammunition now.

Men’s college basketball crossed this bridge a long time ago. John Thompson won a national title with the Georgetown Hoyas in 1984, then Nolan Richardson followed with the Arkansas Razorbacks a decade later and Tubby Smith with the Kentucky Wildcats four years after that. Kevin Ollie was the most recent, with the Connecticut Huskies in 2014.

There will be several other story lines at the Orange Bowl and beyond, but breaking this particular barrier is significant and shouldn’t go overlooked.

“Your color shouldn’t matter,” Freeman said after the Sugar Bowl. “Your evidence of your work should.”

His work is exemplary. As is Franklin’s.

2. The SEC has fallen.

At a time when commissioner Greg Sankey is flexing maximum muscle as a controlling force in college sports, his normally dominant football product is failing to deliver.

The league got just three teams in the 12-team playoff. Regardless of the hysterical complaining that produced from coaches, fans and media fanboys, that was the correct number. And the three that got in are a combined 2–2—and a shaky 2–2.

The Tennessee Volunteers were blown out by the Ohio State Buckeyes in a first-round game in Columbus, Ohio, 42–17. Georgia, dealing with a season-ending injury to quarterback Carson Beck, was predictably impotent offensively in a 13-point loss to Notre Dame. And Texas is fortunate to still be playing, wheezing past 13.5-point underdog Arizona State in overtime Wednesday.

Beyond the playoff, the SEC has had multiple other bowl flops. The Alabama Crimson Tide, which had the most people lobbying for it as a playoff team, was awful in defeat against the 16.5-point underdog Michigan Wolverines. The South Carolina Gamecocks, another team that felt like it deserved a playoff bid, lost to the Illinois Fighting Illini as a nine-point favorite. The Oklahoma Sooners lost to the Navy Midshipmen and the Texas A&M Aggies lost to the USC Trojans, too.

All told, the SEC’s postseason record is a pedestrian 8–6, pending the result of the Mississippi Rebels–Duke Blue Devils in the Gator Bowl on Thursday night.

If Texas doesn’t beat Ohio State—and the Longhorns are an eight-point underdog in that game—this will be the second straight year the SEC is shut out of the national championship game. (Last year it was Michigan against the Washington Huskies.) The last time the SEC went consecutive seasons without at least playing for a natty was 2004 and ’05. 

It’s not like the league is in danger of collapse or anything. But there was a growing fear of an SEC planet for a while, and those fears are not presently being realized.

Good football is being played everywhere. Not just in the South.

Oregon coach Dan Lanning was among the coaches that saw his team come out flat after having a long layoff before playing in the CFP. / Ben Lonergan/The Register-Guard / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

3. The long layoff vs. short layoff results from the quarterfinals will be a big talking point.

The four teams that received first-round byes to the quarterfinals, not playing for three weeks or more, went 0–4. All were beaten by teams that played on Dec. 20 or 21 in first-round games. Three of them fell behind immediately—Arizona State, Boise State and the Oregon Ducks were down by double digits in the first quarter. The fourth, Georgia, was in the game against Notre Dame until an avalanche of key plays at the end of the first half and start of the second.

Only Arizona State came close to winning, taking Texas into double overtime. The other three lost by a minimum of 13 points.

Oregon coach Dan Lanning labeled that disparity in time off an “excuse” and wanted none of it after the Rose Bowl blowout. Georgia coach Kirby Smart also declined to cite that as a disadvantage after the loss to Notre Dame.

Fact is, the sample size is too small to lean on heavily as definitive proof that the format played favorites. Maybe if this replicates itself next season (provided the format remains the same) it will mean something. There also were early blowouts in the first round, when everyone had the same amount of time off.

The one result that truly did not compute was Oregon’s no-show against Ohio State, a team it beat (albeit by a single point) in October. The Ducks did not contribute to their own demise with a spate of turnovers; they simply were manhandled from the start and looked unprepared. But by the end of this tournament, everyone who plays Ohio State may look similarly overwhelmed.

4. The Final Four is marked by former head coaches doing great work as coordinators.

Notre Dame defensive coordinator Al Golden, who was fired as the head coach at Miami in 2015, spent six years as an assistant in the NFL before being hired in South Bend by Freeman. He has the No. 1 unit nationally in takeaways with 31; the No. 2 scoring defense at 13.6 points allowed per game; and the No. 8 in total defense at 295 yards allowed. And he’s done that with a unit that has been waylaid by injuries.

Penn State’s Tom Allen watched successor Curt Cignetti take the Indiana Hoosiers to a surprise playoff berth this season, but that doesn’t mean Allen can’t draw up a defense. The Nittany Lions have allowed just 12 points per game and produced seven takeaways in two playoff games. They were all over Boise State superstar running back Ashton Jeanty in the Fiesta Bowl, limiting him to 104 rushing yards on 30 carries and forcing two fumbles, and that was with star defensive end Abdul Carter missing most of the game with what appeared to be a left arm injury.

Ohio State offensive coordinator Chip Kelly took a voluntary demotion from head coach of the UCLA Bruins, going back to his happy place calling plays and no longer stressing about an NIL payroll. After calling an uncharacteristically awful game in the Buckeyes’ upset loss to the Wolverines on Nov. 30, Kelly has destroyed defenses in the playoff. Ohio State averaged 7.39 yards per play against Tennessee, then upped it to 8.77 against Oregon. The Buckeyes have had to rebuild their offensive line after a couple of key injuries and rebuild their psyches after scoring 10 points against the Wolverines, but those tasks look complete now.

And of course, Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian was once in that role himself, rebounding from a firing at USC to coordinate Alabama’s dominant 2020 national championship offense. Sark came off the Nick Saban career rehab assembly line and got another shot at Texas, at age 46. Golden and Allen are in their 50s and should get another chance to be head coaches; Kelly is 61 and certainly could return to the boss role if he wants it.

For now, though, they’re trying to win national titles as rockstar play-callers.

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