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There was no right choice. Someone deserving was going to get snubbed.
Either the College Football Playoff committee was going to leave out undefeated ACC champion Florida State, which had not looked the same after losing star quarterback Jordan Travis to a season-ending leg injury the last week of November.
Or one-loss Alabama, coming off a stunning upset of back-to-back national champion and No. 1 Georgia, was going to get left out. Some even felt Georgia, if the goal was to take the four best teams, still warranted inclusion.
Those problems are ancient history now that the playoff has expanded to 12 teams this year, giving the sport a true postseason tournament for the first time.
For once, Cinderella will have a seat at the table — the highest-ranked conference champion from the Group of Five gets an automatic bid, along with the winners of the Big Ten, SEC, ACC and Big 12. The other seven slots will be filled by at-large teams. Adding to the anticipation, first-round games will be played on campus.
Former Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh summed up the looming changes succinctly last December.
“It’s just going to be better,” he said.
The same can be said about the state of the sport amid major realignment.
There are now two super leagues, the Big Ten and the SEC, after USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon joined the former, and Texas and Oklahoma were added to the latter.
The Pac-12 is now the Pac-2 (Oregon State and Washington State), as Cal, SMU and Stanford moved to the ACC, and Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah were installed as Big 12 members.
Between the 12-team playoff and new-look conferences that will offer more blockbuster matchups, college football has a vastly different, more inclusive feel to it. Better games and additional teams involved in deciding a champion almost certainly will add eyeballs.
Sound familiar? It should.
“There are a lot of critics who are saying, well, college football is just like the NFL. Well, what’s wrong with that?” ESPN college football analyst and longtime SEC historian Paul Finebaum told The Post by phone. “The NFL is the most successful sport in this nation, and there are reasons for that, because the playoff system involves so many different teams.
“Instead of five or six schools competing [to reach the playoff in college football], you’ve got an endless number, and they are competing for a number of different things. It’s not just getting in the playoff like it has been in the past. Do you get a first-round bye? Can you play at home? It’s the oxygen that keeps the NFL season going the last few weeks, and the same thing is going to apply here.”
Of course, the new system isn’t perfect. Historical rivalries have been lost. There will be increased travel. Some aspects of the regular season may take a hit. The stakes of the all-or-nothing showdowns between elite teams is almost certainty over with.
For instance, two of the past three Michigan-Ohio State meetings were for all the marbles — the winner going on to a Big Ten title and playoff berth, the loser to an irrelevant bowl. The Georgia-Alabama SEC championship game last December had the exact same pressure.
It’s the price to pay for an improved product.
In a decade under the four-team playoff format, just 15 different schools were selected. Of the 40 available bids, Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Georgia and Michigan accounted for 29 of them.
One non-power conference school, Cincinnati of the American Athletic Conference in 2021, was included in the playoff. An independent, Notre Dame is an entity unto itself.
The new format gives hope to second-tier power conference programs that never had realistic playoff dreams before.
It allows margin for error. It makes winning your conference the No. 1 priority, knowing that guarantees a spot in the playoff.
“The excitement I’m sensing and feeling around the sport from fans is that there are more fan bases that are legitimately excited about a potential playoff berth. That certainly wasn’t the case prior,” Fox college football analyst Joel Klatt said. “I have a really good feeling that when we get into November, we’re going to have about 30 teams that still feel like they have a legitimate path to the playoff, and we’ve never had that before in college football.
“So not only do we get Oregon-Ohio State and Texas-Georgia matchups, but we also have the opportunity for teams like Iowa and Kansas and Missouri and many others to be playing really important and impactful and large-scale games late in the year.”
College basketball has March Madness. College football now will have December Drama. It’s the dawn of a new era.
“I think it’s probably the most dramatic and exciting college football season in really anybody’s lifetime, quite frankly. We’ve never really been at a point like this,” Finebaum said. “It’s a breathless time in the sport.”
