It kills daydreams, the “2”.
As the 13-member College Football Playoff selection committee holds its first meetings this weekend near the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, and prepares to release its first findings from the annual national puzzle Tuesday evening of a nine-week-old season, and as these realities reiterate the fact that we’re all really weird, “2” has one last stand. It will lose much of its spice next year. The playoffs will expand from four teams to 12, and someone or someone with the “2” will get past the bouncers.
This has never happened in the 10 seasons of the four-team playoff concept. This happened once during the Bowl Championship Series era, when Fall 2007 lost its lead with parity and LSU entered (and won handily) despite two losses (both in overtime). , but lately, no. Five teams with two losses ended up at No. 5, including 2016 Big Ten champion Penn State, two-time Georgia and last year’s Alabama. One team, Auburn in 2017, reached the SEC championship game against Georgia with two losses and a committee ranking of second, due to its monster victories against the Bulldogs (40-17) and Alabama (26-14) and its forgivable defeats. against Clemson (14-6) and at LSU (27-23). Georgia clocked it, 28-7, and that was it.
As the committee did its math and hopefully drank its wine, the “2” hung in there with three Power Five teams on Saturday. The majority of football-drunk Americans may not have considered these teams to be a big contender for the playoffs, but these teams sure did. The “2” went to No. 13 Utah (6-2) by day, No. 17 North Carolina (6-2) Eastern evening and No. 11 Oregon State (6-2) in the evening of the West.
“They’re crushed,” North Carolina coach Mack Brown said of his players to reporters in Atlanta.
“Yeah, I’m just devastated,” North Carolina quarterback Drake Maye said.
Brown also said something frightening, something indicative of the nature of these football beings. He talked about the 46-42 loss to Georgia Tech with 635 yards passing and a fumbled 42-32 lead with 11 minutes left, and he said, “I’ll watch that in the future.” plane to go home.”
I’ll watch it on the plane…
What a horror to happen to a good man.
“It’s one, I didn’t know what to say (to the team),” Brown said. “I mean, I’ve been doing this for 35 years.”
“2” prepared early, seeming almost visible in the clouds and vaguely snow-capped mountains above Salt Lake City. Oregon (then 6-1) would play Utah (then 6-1) in the nation’s first matchup, and someone would get the damn “2.” The someone quickly and clearly became Utah, and there’s a melancholy in that, because Utah in the playoffs would be a great story, and Utah has been chipping away at the playoffs, especially in 2019, and the Utah could have looked even better this year with its veteran. quarterback Cam Rising has been injury-free all season.
Oregon’s 35-6 victory left Utah coach Kyle Whittingham, the nation’s second-longest-tenured major league coach, finding it “as thoroughly and soundly as we’ve been beaten in a long time, especially at home here” and said, “It was worse than the score indicated,” and delving into grimacing memories “trying to remember an experience like that” and recalling the glaring 47-7 defeat at home in 2010 when it was ranked No. 6 compared to then No. 1. 4 TCU, which has never lost this season.
“When you get beat like that,” Whittingham said, “you don’t want to go in there and berate your football team, or intimidate them. What happened there was enough.
While sane people slept in the East, an Oregon State team that any objective soul could love, one of two Pac-12 teams expected to drop in a crude realignment, took Arizona to a 17-13 lead early in the fourth quarter, then saw the Wildcats outscore the Beavers 116-13 over the next five possessions, three of which belonged to Arizona. It started with a nice play often overlooked in football discussions, a quarterback’s punt to an open field and the 5-yard line, by quarterback and skilled part-time punter Noah Fifita .
If the committee viewed this bleakly, it learned that among the Power Five, it has five undefeated teams and eight once-defeated teams to sort through. The committee is made up of nine current athletic directors, including Michigan’s Warde Manuel, which must be a lot of fun considering the ongoing investigation into the theft of signals, two renowned former college players, a former coach, and a sports writer/professor. The sports editor is, by definition, the brains of the operation, although that old joke becomes a serious challenge when you consider former Notre Dame linebacker Rod West and his bachelor’s degree in mathematics, his degree in law and his MBA from Tulane and his life running things.
All 10 of these playoff committees, even as their membership changes, have valued the caliber of opponents above all other matters, a welcome change from the even tougher days of yore. So this committee has Ohio State (8-0) to place first, probably because the Buckeyes are nodding. at Notre Dame And on Penn State give them the highest caliber. Then there is Washington (8-0, with Oregon as the main victim) and Florida State (8-0, with LSU the main victim) to rate right after. Then there’s Georgia and Michigan, whose schedules so far mean they might even find themselves behind one or two of the one-loss teams.
If these one-loss teams were Oregon (7-1) or Texas (7-1), the committee would not have committed folly, especially considering Texas’ resounding victory in Alabama. As for Oregon, it looked like a dream on offense and defense in Utah’s tough assignment, where no one had won with fans in attendance since 2018, and where the football dialect was given a sublime reading from the Oregon quarterback Bo Nix.
As Nix described Oregon’s second touchdown, a short 18-yard pass over the middle and all the considerations and options that sent him wandering into the backfield before the snap, he spoke a language bizarre to most civilizations over the 200,000 years of human existence:
“Yeah, so we started with a frozen count, trying to see if (unintelligible). We knew their DC, what he was going to call based on the formation, so when we got the next call, he called a play that everyone had seen from the formation. Well, they didn’t skip, so we moved straight to the next game (of your choice). We moved, they checked, so when they checked a field pressure, we checked an angle again. It all happened very quickly and there are three different things happening, and the O-line connection, and you have to whisper it to everyone, because it’s loud and hostile.
Everything grew quieter in the big stadium near the mountains then and afterward, and Utah linebacker Karene Reid thought of Nix and the remarkable running back Bucky Irving and the remarkable receiver Troy Franklin and to all this and said: “They are super balanced. They have a good running and passing game. And you have to be strong in both cases.
Asked if this was the best team the Utes have faced, Reid said, “I think the score says so, yes.”
This team had just stuck their team with the “2”.
