Not since Geraldo Rivera hosted an expedition to open Al Capone’s vault in 1986 has a made-for-TV spectacle delivered a dud quite as disappointing as the first round of the 12-team College Playoff.
Once the novelty of postseason games played on campuses wore off, the four opening-round matchups devolved into the same sort of lopsided snooze-fests that often plagued the semifinals of the four-team Playoff.
In almost every case, the on-campus novelty lasted barely more than a quarter at most. Only the 38-24 Texas win over Clemson had a halftime margin in the single digits.
This new format had evident flaws well before this weekend’s quartet of forgettable games. Guaranteed bids for conference champions aren’t inherently a bad idea and help maintain the importance of league titles in a sport that has long prioritized conference supremacy over the national landscape.
Guaranteeing conference champions priority in seeding, however, may have contributed to the first round’s slate of stinkers. Moving third-ranked Texas and fourth-ranked Penn State into the two byes that Boise State and, more dubiously, Arizona State occupy would have made for an opening round docket of:
- Clemson at Notre Dame
- Arizona State at Ohio State
- SMU at Tennessee
- Boise State at Indiana
Would this have made for better games? Perhaps so, perhaps not—but it would have been awfully difficult to produce worse games.
Meanwhile, coming out of a series of blowouts, the sport is faced with a shift in narrative. The conversation has gone from debating whether the third- or fourth-ranked teams were more deserving of a national championship shot in the Bowl Championship Series era, or the fifth- or sixth-ranked teams in the four-team Playoff days, to now squabbling between teams with a lot of wins but none of consequence (Indiana, SMU) vs. teams that lost a quarter of their regular-season contests (Alabama, Ole Miss).
The quarterfinals should presumably produce more compelling matchups, and in at least one instance, that’s based on more than conjecture. Oregon outlasted Ohio State in October in one of the best games of a roller-coaster regular season. Bookending an ugly performance against Michigan with dominant performances against Playoff teams Indiana and Tennessee, the Buckeyes look the part of a preseason pick to win the national championship.
Bonus points for the rematch playing out at the Rose Bowl, offering a traditional Pac-12 vs. Big Ten pairing. But viewed from Oregon’s perspective, it’s difficult not to see this as a devaluation of the Ducks’ outstanding regular season—including that incredible, 32-31 win over the Buckeyes.
With two weeks between the first round and the quarterfinals, there’s plenty of time for the bracket to reshuffle based on the remaining seeds. Doing so this year based on the remaining eight’s rankings would produce the following four matchups:
- Oregon vs. 8. Arizona State
- Georgia vs. 7. Boise State
- Texas vs. 6. Ohio State
- Penn State vs. 5. Notre Dame
Along with the quizzical, if not downright faulty, nature of how the bracket’s constructed, another intriguing storyline of the quarterfinals will be rest vs. rust.
The Football Championship Subdivision rewards the top eight teams with opening-round byes in the 24-team bracket. However, because the FCS Playoffs begin immediately after the regular season concludes and each round is staged weekly until the championship, automatically advancing to the next round functions as a bye week.
The four conference champions—Oregon, Georgia, Boise State, and Arizona State—will have gone almost a month between games. How this impacts their performance against an opponent with more recent competition provides another key plot point for the quarterfinals.
Either way, the next round offers better matchups—at least on paper. The bar to clear after this disappointing introduction could not be much lower.