The NCAA finally gets the College Football Playoff it deserves

The only winners in college football are those who understand the depth of its depravation. Everyone else will walk away from the 2023 season with the big fat loss they deserve. The presidents and trustees. The conference executives and committeemen. The athletic directors and boosters. The disingenuous, parasitic, exploitative system that all of them conspired to create. Instead of a champion, they will have a field full of losers, none more deserving than themselves.

It is a beautiful thing. That is where we must focus. On the beauty of it all. If your goal was to show college football for what it is, you could not have crafted a more elegant solution than what the playoff selection committee came up with on Sunday afternoon. In Florida State, it had a team that had done everything a team was supposed to do, everything a team could do, everything that every other team in the history of the college football playoffs had done to earn the right to prove itself therein. Not only that, but the Seminoles did it in a manner that was the very definition of collegiate. They overcame adversity. They rose to the challenge. They stuck together and were never defeated. The committee considered all of those things and decided they were of secondary value.

None of this comes as a surprise. By the time Alabama and Georgia kicked off in the SEC title game on Saturday, it seemed almost certain that the winner would be chosen for the playoffs. Texas’ win over Alabama would be decisive in either circumstance. Undefeated Washington was in, and so would be Michigan as long as it remained so against an overmatched Iowa team. Everyone assumed Florida State’s fate was sealed when it lost star quarterback Jordan Travis for the season. Turns out, they were right.

The real surprise came with the frankness with which all of this was acknowledged.

“Player availability was really important to what’s going on,” selection committee chairman Boo Corrigan said on ESPN on Sunday afternoon. “You can lose a running back, you can lose a wide receiver, but a quarterback as dynamic as Jordan Travis, it changes their offense entirely.”

Don’t blame us, they said. Blame the kid. He was bigger than the team.

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Blanche all you like. That’s the message. That’s what they said to the other 80 players on the team who rallied to beat Florida and Louisville. It’s what they said to the students who continued to support and believe. Florida had just nearly upset the third-best team in the SEC. Louisville was ranked in the top 20. Doesn’t matter, they said. It isn’t about the accomplishments of the school, or the team, or the university. It’s the name on the back of the jersey that matters.

Think, too, about the weight that Travis must bear. Seems that name, image, and likeness were always more valuable than the NCAA let on.

This is the NCAA’s abomination. Let’s not forget that. The College Football Playoff may be a self-contained entity, but it is the university presidents’ abomination. They’d love you to think otherwise. Just look at the graphics that ESPN used during its hourlong selection show on Sunday. The Prudential Rose Bowl. The Allstate Sugar Bowl. The National Championship presented by AT&T. Nowhere did you see the NCAA logo. Professional sports? That’s not their business.

For nine years, fate was on their side. Four deserving teams, four playoff spots, the unbridled spirit of pure competition. But then came Year 10, and karma would not allow cowardice to abide. Time to play favorites.

The point isn’t that the committeepeople got it wrong. They were charged with picking the four-team field that would create the most competitive playoff environment. Few will argue that, on paper, Alabama is not better competition than Florida State sans Travis.

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The point is that the mandate is completely at odds with what the NCAA season is supposed to represent. On paper? That’s supposed to be the starting point. We then see what is proven on the field. Florida State proved everything it could. In the end, it didn’t matter.

Which is why all of this is perfect. The perfect end to an awful playoff format that has always been more authoritarian than meritocratic. In the last year of a flawed system born of the internal contradictions of for-profit amateur sports, college football gets a postseason befitting the circus it has become.

There will be no champion, not when the alleged championship tournament excludes a deserving team for reasons other than what it accomplished on the field. Whatever one of these four participants proves, it won’t have proven itself better than the team that did not compete. Nobody wins. That is the outcome. Everyone deserves it.