The beauty of the College Football Playoff is the great debate it creates.
We have weekly ranking shows starting in November and, really, they don’t do anything besides drive us crazy in our feeble attempts to get inside the collective mind of the selection committee.
Often times, that debate goes down to the wire. In three of the first four years, we’ve had debate up until Selection Sunday as to whether Team X was more deserving than Team Y. The only year that we really had a clear picture of the field heading into the final day was 2015, because as long as No. 5 Oklahoma won, the loser of the Big Ten Championship between Iowa and Michigan State would bounce out of the top 4. There was zero suspense on that Sunday.
I’m starting to think that we’re heading in a similar direction in 2018. But instead of there being a bunch of one-loss teams in the field like there were in 2015, I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw multiple undefeated teams earn Playoff bids.
I say that after the first Saturday in October in which we lost three Power 5 unbeatens, two of which were from the SEC.
There are now 8 Power 5 unbeatens (including Notre Dame):
- Alabama 6-0
- Clemson 6-0
- Georgia 6-0
- Ohio State 6-0
- Notre Dame 6-0
- West Virginia 5-0
- Colorado 5-0
- N.C. State 5-0
That obviously doesn’t include UCF, which certainly has potential to make this thing interesting, but another undefeated season is a tall task.
My fear, however, is that we have three conference champs that are so clearly heads and shoulders above their competition, and there’s essentially one spot available that’ll be clinched in a conference championship game.
Why?
Well, nobody has been close to even forcing Alabama to play its starters for 50 minutes. The ACC is in a significant down year and doesn’t look like it has a worthy fighter for Clemson. And Ohio State has its biggest non-conference hurdle and biggest in-conference hurdle already cleared.
My fear is that we’re going to have those three teams with 11-1 or 12-0 Notre Dame ready to take the last spot without even having to play a conference title game. Keep in mind that we’ve still yet to see the Power 5 team who ran the table in a nine-game schedule win the conference championship and make the Playoff. That’s why I’m skeptical of Texas making the field, even after Saturday’s monumental win against Oklahoma.
It’s also the reason that I’m skeptical of anyone from the Pac-12 making the field, considering the conference’s top contender (Washington) suffered a non-conference play loss and would have to pull off the 9-0, conference title sweep. And Oregon with a loss won’t merit any discussion after it had the weakest non-conference schedule in America.
So should we just fast forward to the end here? Is that how boring this all could be?
Not necessarily. We could get things like N.C. State taking down Clemson next week — that’d be fascinating — or even Notre Dame at 11-1 along with several one-loss contenders would make for interesting drama. And there is still the chance that UCF is so dominant that it forces the selection committee to notice it this year.
But this is shaping up like a year in which the selection committee could pick old reliable and not think twice about it. As interesting of a situation as Notre Dame is in, that résumé isn’t changing in the last week of the year without a conference title, so we should have a pretty good idea of what it’d take a 1-loss Irish squad to make the field.
An anticlimactic Selection Sunday would confirm the belief many have that it would be an eight-team field just because of the lack of variability. And if this year’s field was made up of the three most obvious candidates right now (Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State), there would be a certain staleness to it.
I say this not in an effort to be a buzzkill after six weeks or to suggest that I dislike the Playoff system. I, in fact, have no problem with it staying at four. I’m sure I’d enjoy it at eight teams, too.
Consider this my plea for some craziness. We could use some of it to at least make some season-long intrigue.
Last year’s debate with Alabama-Ohio State was entertaining stuff, as was the Ohio State-Penn State debate in 2016. Come to think of it, the 2014 debate between Ohio State and TCU shows that the Buckeyes basically need to lose a game to become interesting. Super interesting.
Chaos creates interest. We’ve got enough of that in the real world.
But I’ll gladly take some more of it with this year’s college football season.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
