"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need." --The Rolling Stones
College football fans have forever bemoaned the lack of a playoff to determine a national champion. That they've had such a structure for a decade has either escaped their notice or rattled them into cognitive dissonance. A single-game showdown between the best two teams is a playoff.
Still, college football fandom demands a four-team or eight team tournament. This year, no thanks to the NCAA, a playoff structure has emerged that's three rounds deep with two games left in the season. The whining continues unabated as this inconvenient truth has yet to settle in. Let's take the ride together, shall we?
Notre Dame has a semi-final scrum this weekend against the team claiming to be Southern Cal. If Our Lady wins, they go to the championship. Lose and they're out. That's a playoff game.
Alabama and Georgia both have quarter-final walkovers this weekend against state rivals Auburn and Georgia Tech respectively. The former is a hoodoo and the latter is a fake, so the Crimson Tide and Dawgs should advance with little resistance. Lose, against all odds -- and in this case I'm looking only at you, Georgia, since an Auburn upset could be considered nothing less than an optical illusion -- and the league championship the following week would simply be a consolation game. Assuming the cosmos remains intact, Alabama and Georgia will square off in two weeks with the SEC crown and a slot in the national title game in the balance.
Oregon, now ranked fourth, visits Corvalis for the inaptly named Civil War (in Oregon?) this weekend. A Notre Dame defeat opens the door for their contest to serve as a semi-final as well, unless Stanford slips against UCLA, allowing Oregon into the Pac-12 championship game. That would, ironically, bump this week's contest back to a quarter-final with the league title game as a possible semi-final.
Florida plays Florida State this weekend in a matchup that had lost much of its luster in recent years, but could serve as a national semi-final now. A couple of well-placed results could land the victor in the national title tilt. You may be thinking that it's unlikely that Notre Dame and Oregon would both lose, (or that one would succumb while Georgia and Alabama both split) but then you would already be forgetting the events of the weekend past.
In none of these scenarios does an eligible undefeated team get left out, a two-loss team hop over one-loss contenders or a one-loss team out-flank any serious one-loss contenders, except perhaps Notre Dame, which has its future in its own hands. (Kansas State might squawk about that, but such is the penalty for losing to a Baylor squad that entered their game 1-5 in league play.) Even the lowest ranked team named here, the one-loss Seminoles, would have vanquished #9 Clemson and #5 Florida among its victories.
Thus, up to six formidable teams are still vying for the championship. They will play up to seven determinative football games these next two weeks, and in no case will a loser nonetheless slip into the championship picture. That, my friends, is a playoff. The only thing left to complain about is that there's no reasonable cause for complaint.
Unless you're an Ohio State fan.
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