By Roger Grossman
News Now Warsaw
You guessed it, I am angry.
When ESPN revealed the 12 teams that had been selected for the College Football Playoff, and the Notre Dame logo was nowhere to be found, I was spittin’ nickels.
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I just sat there. I am on new blood pressure medicine, and I am pretty sure it wasn’t having much effect in the hours that followed the reveal.
I was angry.
But let me go no further without heaping all due praise on the Indiana Hoosiers for unseating the king of college football, the Ohio State Buckeyes.
Two seasons ago, Indiana was 3-9 overall, 1-8 in the Big Ten, and about to fire Tom Allen.
Today, they are the best team in all the land. There is no debate in that. No one says today “I know IU won and all, but…”
No “buts”.
Good for them, and good for you, Hoosier fans.
You’ve endured many long autumns waiting for basketball season, never dreaming of this being possible.
Here’s hoping your boys have three more wins left in them.
Now, back to where we started.
The debate in the days leading up to Sunday was the “Miami vs. Notre Dame” discussion. The implication was that they couldn’t both get into the field of 12 teams.
The follow-up question was, “Notre Dame is in the top 10 in the College Football Playoff rankings, how can they not be in the 12-team playoff?”
Well, the rules of the playoffs this year allow James Madison and Tulane to be part of the tournament.
Both schools had very good football seasons. Their combined record is 23-1! But no one who comments on college football at any level in any capacity thinks that JMU or Tulane has a snowball’s chance in July of beating any of the teams in the field that will vie for the national football championship.
They don’t deserve this.
Yes, Notre Dame started 0-2, but they lost in the final half-minute of both of those games, and the two teams they lost to are in this tournament.
Alabama, for example, was selected to the field despite losing to a Florida State team that finished 5-7 by two touchdowns, to Oklahoma, and then being blown out by Georgia in the conference championship game. ‘Bama has 3 losses. How can you be the best team in the country when you have lost three times in 13 games?
Hint: you can’t.
But that’s where the rubber meets the road on all of this.
Who is in charge of college football? The conferences, that’s who.
There is no commissioner. There is no impartial, unattached arbiter who settles disputes and maintains a fair and level playing field.
The rules change every year. The number of teams allowed to compete for the championship changes. Where those teams come from changes. How those teams are assigned seeding changes.
Adjustments are the only constant, and those changes are made for the purpose of making more money and allowing more teams from certain conferences in.
These forces bend and shape the very essence of the sport of college football to suit their own wants and desires. Their greed and lust for money and power conquered their sense of competition.
Someone will have to answer for this mess. Someone is going to have to explain how the 20th and 24th best teams in the country get a seat at the table while the 10th-ranked team can’t be in a 12-team tournament.
Someone is going to have to account for if ESPN’s influence may have played a role in an SEC team getting in and a non-SEC team being left out. ESPN and ABC gets the college football playoff broadcasts, and they own the SEC Network. Conflict of interest? Heck yah, it is.
Someone is going to have to investigate if and how much the decision to leave the Irish, BYU and Texas out of the competition was made with the influence of gambling involvement.
You know me—you know I wouldn’t bring these things up if the very leadership of college football hadn’t opened the door to the possibility of it.
It is the epitome of the concept that “it’s not the impropriety, it’s the appearance of impropriety.”
If we can’t trust what we see with our own eyes, then we don’t have a competitive sport, we have entertainment. We have pro wrestling, where the outcome is not the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, but the end of this week’s storyline with a teaser for the next episode.
And with it, the death of college football as we have come to love it.
That may not be what happened … but how will we ever be able to tell the difference?
