Make a note, this is historic: The college football national championship system worked.
On Monday, college football crowned its first national champion of the College Football Playoff era when No. 4 seed Ohio State shocked No. 2 seed Oregon 42-20 in North Texas.
In the old Bowl Championship Series era (1998 to last season), neither team would probably have even played for the national championship. The BCS would likely have spit out Alabama, No. 1 in the AP before the bowl season, and Florida State, which was No. 2.
The Seminoles were the defending national champions and had won 29 straight games, so they surely would have been picked over Oregon or Ohio State to play the Crimson Tide for the national championship game. This year, the college football Jedi Council added the four-team playoff and a committee to select them.
In the semifinals, Oregon crushed Florida State in the Rose Bowl, 59-20, and Ohio State shocked the world by rallying from a 21-6 deficit and knocking the SEC out of the national title game for the first time in nine years.
The semifinals were a part of the revamped New Year’s Six, which put the six most prominent bowls front and center on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.
While Arizona lost, playing in the Fiesta Bowl in the New Year’s Six was a great boost to the program.
The system preserved the pageantry of the bowls, featuring mainstays such as parades, video games and eating contests, before the game.
After the bowls came the national championship game, where Ohio State pounded Oregon, despite starting its third-string quarterback. In the old system, as Big Ten and Pac-12 Conference champions, those two teams would have played in the Rose Bowl, and while it would have been cool, that would be the end of it.
Instead, the four seed won the “undisputed national championship” for the first time in college football history.
Maybe TCU, which won the Peach Bowl 42-3, has a gripe for not being included in the playoff, but so far, the College Football Playoff has been a rousing success.
Week after week, teams eliminated each other, and then Cinderella (sort of) won it all — making the CFP a mix of the importance of the regular season under the old system and men’s basketball’s March Madness.
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