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Miami would have given the ACC its best chance of advancing in the Playoff
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Maybe things will change once in the quarterfinals. Or semifinals. Or hopefully, by the time the field is narrowed to the final 2 playing for the championship on Jan. 20.
But at least through the opening round this past weekend, the most popular game associated with the new 12-team College Football Playoff wasn’t played in Texas or on a frozen field in South Bend, State College or Columbus.
It’s the “what-if””” game.
What if Alabama had gotten in instead of SMU? Or South Carolina instead of Indiana?
Surely, the games would have been better and a lot more competitive.
Right?
Of course, they would have. That’s how hypotheticals work. Especially from an SEC perspective.
So since everyone else, including ESPN’s highest-profile college football talking head Kirk Herbstreit seems to be getting into the act, let’s play a little “what-if” from the ACC perspective.
What if the Playoff Committee had put Miami into the bracket instead of leaving it hanging as one of the first teams out?
That’s an easy one.
The Hurricanes would have given the ACC a significantly better shot at advancing a team into the quarterfinals, and maybe beyond, than either of the final 2 at-large selections.
This is not to suggest that Miami should have been picked ahead of Indiana or SMU. (Or even Alabama, for that matter.) Mario Cristobal’s team earned its spot outside the top 12 and a ticket to the Pop-Tarts Bowl by coughing up a 21-point lead and losing to Syracuse in the final game of the regular season.
But if the Hurricanes had been in the Playoff, Notre Dame and Penn State would have had to work much harder for their opening-round victories. If for no other reason than one of them would have had to deal with Heisman Trophy finalist Cam Ward and the nation’s highest-scoring offense.
Never mind that Miami’s defense got torched by 41 points in that season-altering loss to the Orange. Statistically, the Hurricanes led the ACC in total defense and finished in the top half nationally at 23.9 points per game.
Even if their young, banged-up secondary had continued to falter, Ward would have been fully capable of overcoming the obstacle and winning a high-scoring shootout.
He’s has already done it. Multiple times. On the road.
He led his team back from a 25-point second-half deficit to beat Cal, then followed that 2 weeks later by throwing 4 touchdown passes in a 52-45 win at Louisville.
There’s little doubt that the Irish and Nittany Lions are both happier having had to face Kurtis Rourke, with Indiana’s inferior offensive line and ultra-conservative offense, and SMU’s mistake-prone Kevin Jennings than having to deal with an elite veteran quarterback who has thrown for 4,123 yards and an FBS-best 36 touchdowns this season.
And Ward is far from Miami’s only effective offensive weapon.
The soon-to-be first-round NFL Draft pick is surrounded by a group of playmakers in the passing and running games who could eventually join him on Sundays, along with an offensive line as big and physical as any in the SEC or Big Ten.
The biggest question surrounding the Hurricanes, other than Cristobal’s suspect strategic and game-management tendencies, is how they’d handle the cold.
Folks in South Florida usually start bundling up anytime the temperature drops below 70. So you know those players would have been uncomfortable dealing with the subfreezing conditions they’d have faced in a Playoff venue last weekend.
The cold certainly had an adverse effect on fellow warm-weather ACC rival SMU.
Or at least its most important player.
Jennings visibly struggled with his grip on the ball all afternoon against Penn State.
It’s a problem that led to him throwing behind wide-open tight end Matthew Hibner on a 4th-down pass near the end zone early in the game – which in fairness, should still have been caught for a touchdown. And a wobbly underthrow led to at least 1 of the pick-6s that all but ended the Mustangs’ chances of winning by halftime.
Who’s to say whether Ward might have had just as much trouble adjusting? Or if his penchant for trying to do too much by squeezing the ball into impossible windows wouldn’t have gotten the best of him.
They’re very real possibilities in an actual game.
But that’s not what we’re dealing with here.
We might never know what would have happened in an actual game. But in the what-if game, the answer is always as clear as a cloudless sky over a packed stadium.
Award-winning columnist Brett Friedlander has covered the ACC and college basketball since the 1980s.
