The College Football Playoff are set, and you will not be surprised to find that four schools with robust fan support have emerged from the most bizarre season in history.
It was always going to be this way. Because this is the point.
Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Notre Dame will move on to the most high-profile games of the season not simply because they have been good at football but because they are vastly better than many of the alternatives at holding the attention of fans and deriving revenue from them.
Yes, the No. 5 team, Texas A&M, has its share of support and draws 100,000 fans to home games. But Notre Dame remains a national brand. Just ignore the way it got completely dominated by the No. 2 seed, Clemson, only a day ago!
The real mess occurs outside of the actual playoff hunt, though. Undefeated Cincinnati came in at No. 8, behind 8-2 Oklahoma and a Florida team that just lost the SEC Championship (its *third* loss!). That means the Bearcats were never really even in the discussion, which means that No. 1 Cincinnati advocate Nate Scott remains enraged.
Coastal Carolina, finished 11-0 and never broke into the Top 10 of the CFP rankings.
Smart college football writers have explained why so many decisions made by the 13-person CFP selection committee don’t make any sense at all. You should read Nicole Auerbach and Chris Vannini at The Athletic, and Dan Wetzel over at Yahoo. Or Pat Forde of Sports Illustrated. USA Today’s Dan Wolken has been an important voice on this story, too.
It’s a feature, not a bug https://t.co/feE5EhpGh1
— Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) December 20, 2020
The problem, of course, is that the CFP tries to uphold the illusion that all things are equal and that every team has a chance. It’s such a silly mirage. Here’s the selection committee chair Gary Barta, just carrying water for the whole group — and, by extension, the so-called Power Five.
Gary Barta with the lie of the year: "When the year starts out everybody has the same opportunity to be evaluated."
— Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) December 20, 2020
Barta is the AD at Iowa, of the Big Ten, and it’s abundantly clear who he works for. It’s not just the five “elite” conferences, it’s the elite within those conferences too. Indiana, which has a much smaller base of hardcore football fans than the Big Ten’s top programs, hasn’t gotten nearly the respect it deserves.
That’s because Barta actually works for the TV networks and sponsors that provide the money behind the CFP games and the other top bowl games. Once upon a time, these groups may have had the imagination needed to accept an upstart Cincinnati team or an underdog like Coastal Carolina or Indiana and tried to sell those stories to viewers. But with ever-fractured attention spans pulling fans toward so many other things, a team with a built-in following is preferred. Unexpected winners make for good movies, but they don’t move tickets or merchandise or drive TV deals.
The Power Five derives power from its ability to generate revenue, and will therefore make decisions based almost entirely on ensuring that revenue is maximized. Cincinnati, Coastal Carolina and the rest of the Group of Five — what a name! — are left chasing, hoping for scraps. That’s the dynamic. That’s the explanation for decisions that otherwise can’t be explained.
Gary Barta isn’t earnestly trying to explain the ins and outs of something that is admittedly intricate and difficult when he discusses the committee’s process. He’s deflecting your attention from a money grab built on the backs of unpaid athletes who’ve played through a global pandemic — and the fact that the whole thing is ultimately built to prioritize the brands that monetize the most. Football long ago stopped being the point.
I’ve seen this sentiment quite a bit today: If there ever was a year to vary the playoff field, this was it! To those of use watching from afar, hoping for something different, that makes sense. But Barta and Co. only have to pretend to care about that notion; the pandemic made them watch a few unexpected teams and forced them to craft unusual justifications, but mostly it cost them their usual revenue streams. So changing things up now was never really a consideration.
What’s a G5 school or conference commissioner to do? I’m not sure there’s an answer. Even the scraps from above are lucrative. These teams literally get paid to go play games against P5 teams. That’s their place in the ecosystem.
Each year, one or two of them get to make a case for being more, and we have discussions like this one, and it’s nice for the discourse but it all goes nowhere. Then their coaches get hired away using the money they can’t get access to and the cycle goes and goes and goes.
Put Cincinnati in the College Football Playoff, you absolute cowards