Even as a 4-team Playoff supporter, I’m more excited than ever for this weekend
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I didn’t need 12.
Don’t get it twisted. I’m not the type of college football fan who longed for the days of computers or media polls determining national champs. You know those people. They pretend that the sport was at its purest form instead of even more maddeningly subjective than it is with the Playoff format.
But no, I didn’t need a 12-team Playoff. I didn’t believe that a 12-team Playoff alone would drastically expand the field of teams that could win a national championship because the talent is far more skewed than some care to acknowledge and simply adding extra games wouldn’t eliminate that. That could be an unpopular opinion. Or rather, maybe that’ll prove to be an outdated opinion after we get a true sample size of the 12-team Playoff and how unpredictable the champion is.
So why, then, can I not contain my excitement for the week ahead? It’s simple — the next month will provide more entertainment to crown a national championship than any year before it.
We can have a handful of dud games and get 2 or 3 that deliver — that would be 2 or 3 of the 11 total games that’ll be played — which would still provide more entertainment than the 4-team/BCS/media poll ways of old. I’m here for that.
Again, I’m thinking about how fired up I am at this moment. In the rearview mirror, we’ve got those debates about 3-loss teams that didn’t have any business playing for a national championship. We didn’t debate 3-loss Clemson; we rolled our eyes at how the Tigers backed their way in by losing the 3 toughest games of the regular season but winning the ACC to earn an auto bid.
That’s in the past. Even if a team like Clemson or SMU gets blown out in the first round of its Playoff matchup, there won’t be this anticlimactic sense that we’ve had in years past. After all, there will still be 7 more games after the first round concludes. A dud first round with 4 blowouts could actually be spun as “now we’re about to get 4 elite quarterfinal matchups,” instead of “this is why you don’t need anything more than the 2 best teams to decide a national title.” Whether that proves to be true or not, that’s a win for the sport.
And honestly, this week of buildup is a win for the sport. Regardless of whether you needed the 12-team Playoff or not, we should all be able to agree on one thing. This is about to be one of the all-time weekends that college football has ever had. Just in case you don’t have this viewing schedule burned into your brain, here’s what we get:
- Friday, Dec. 20
- Indiana at Notre Dame, 8 pm ET
- Saturday, Dec. 21
- SMU at Penn State, Noon ET
- Clemson at Texas, 4 p.m. ET
- Tennessee at Ohio State, 8 p.m. ET
We basically get to run that back on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day with the 4 quarterfinal matchups.
This is the closest that college football has ever gotten to the juice of the first 2 rounds of the NCAA Tournament. And no, you’re not able to watch 3 Playoff games at the same time as you can with the NCAA Tournament, but it’s like we fast-forwarded to the Sweet 16.
If you can’t get excited about that, I’m not sure what to tell you. Maybe go watch some early-season NBA?
The better move is to dial into all things Playoff. It’s not a Playoff field that has some 2019 crop of quarterbacks (the “weakest” quarterback in that bunch was … Trevor Lawrence?) but the storylines will never be lacking in any 12-team field. I’m overflowing with questions that’ll be answered during the Playoff:
- Will James Franklin’s 3-19 record vs. AP Top 10 teams define Penn State’s Playoff run?
- Will Ryan Day become the first coach to get fired after making the Playoff?
- How much Arch Manning will we see?
- Can Gunner Stockton pull a Cardale Jones and lead UGA to its 3rd title in 4 years?
- Is Ashton Jeanty about to go full 2010 Cam Newton and carry Boise State to a title?
- Can Dan Lanning become the youngest coach to win a national title since Danny Ford in 1981?
- Which team will Lane Kiffin inevitably troll during the first round when he pretends that 3-loss Ole Miss would’ve won it all?
Those are just a few of the questions that’ll define the next few weeks. It’s cliché to declare that “legacies will be defined” in a postseason. That’s how any postseason works. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work.
Forever, though, only the extreme minority of college football programs could embody that. We had a postseason that was more known for infuriating and excluding than being known for celebrating and cementing. Again, I say that as someone who didn’t need 12.
Now, all I need is for Friday to get here as soon as possible.
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.
