College football championship (OT)

schillingfan 2025-01-04 00:19:50 UTC #1

Interesting how the quarterfinals went. I wasn’t surprised my Ducks lost to OSU. Only one of the four bye teams won and Texas barely beat AS. (Good game) All those years Oregon would have won when they were the only undefeated team! Go PennState. Hopefully they will change the seedlings not to put conference champs all in the top four.

zambonir 2025-01-04 00:51:00 UTC #2

Texas didn't have a bye either. Top 4 seeds all lost. ASU was the 3rd seed.

phillychuck 2025-01-04 01:51:26 UTC #3

Hate to say it, but there is a boatload of pressure on Franklin with all the top seeds dropping. If he is ever going to break through this is the year. They really are a better team than Notre Dame, but ND is hot right now. PSU's offense is better than Georgia's, and they have a comparable defense to ND's. If Abdul Carter is healthy I think PSU's defense is capable of making more big plays, too.

Beating OSU is a different story, but they certainly can compete with them.

zambonir 2025-01-04 02:53:24 UTC #4

Well, he technically hasn't broken the top opponent curse yet but I'd say just getting this far is still pretty impressive, and PSU also seems to be playing much better in the past however long it's been (since the Ohio State loss). They really need Carter though.

And there's pressure, but not that much really. Everyone knows the seeds didn't mean that much. Texas is just as good as Georgia (even though Georgia beat them twice, they had their own flaws and lost their QB) and Ohio State clearly soared past Oregon in the end.

Either way, dude is unfirable so long as he doesn't go back to five or six loss seasons (or a couple of fours in a row). I think they'll be in the CFP more years than not (and should be very good next year too) but they still have some catching up to do in NIL (as he'd be the first to tell you).

If they do get to play Ohio State maybe they can wear Michigan helmets.

andyb 2025-01-04 04:48:22 UTC #5

Guessing next year they will change the seeding to best 12 teams regardless of conference byes. Big 10 and SEC are so head and shoulders above everything else that it does not make sense the 4 best conference champions get byes.

It is definitely interesting how the Big 10 is doing better than the SEC this year when the SEC seemed so much deeper during the season.

zambonir 2025-01-04 13:15:18 UTC #6

No doubt. It's also the last year of the contract so that's when things might really change again - further expansion or moving the quarterfinals to campus or screwing over the non Power 4 teams. They really need to get rid of the conference championships but both that and changing up the bowl system will be politically/economically difficult.

SEC sort of cannibalized itself with the depth, while Oregon and Ohio State cruised all season as top teams until the Michigan game, while Penn State only lost to those two teams. Georgia was just never dominant (and then lost their QB) and Texas couldn't beat Georgia (twice).

Also not really fair that not only can Notre Dame not have a Top 4 seed but stayed stuck behind two teams that had just lost their conference championship (they were 4th behind Texas and Penn State the week before but then Georgia had be squeezed in without those two teams moving down more than one spot).

Had the bracket just reflected the rankings this year #4 Penn State would have played #5 Notre Dame (assuming they'd won their first game) and #3 Texas would have played #6 Ohio State in the quarters, instead of now. But Oregon and Georgia would have had easier games

zambonir 2025-01-04 15:29:38 UTC #7

Of course, the current system is just NFL-like rather than March Madness like. Though with the added punishment that the high seeds don't even get to host a game.

A 14-win Vikings or Lions team will be relegated to a wild-card berth and be forced to the road to start the playoffs. Would you change the NFL’s playoff format and give the top four seeds in each conference to the teams with the best records?

Keefer: I would. And this season is a perfect illustration why: a 14-3 team — either the Vikings or Lions — is going to open the playoffs on the road after excelling in the toughest division in the league all season. And that team will likely be playing on the home field of the NFC South winner, which will have won four games fewer. That could be the difference between a championship run and a first-round exit. Teams that consistently perform all season shouldn’t be punished for the fact that their division is excellent.

andyb 2025-01-05 00:33:18 UTC #8

The NFL does have much more parity than college football so the odd 7-9 or 8-8 division winner might not be too far away talent-wise from the 12 or 13 win team, especially with late season injuries being a great equalizer.

The college Big 2 conferences and everyone else is actually a problem for the long run. It is not just seeding that they will fix. If there is so much money in the top 2 conferences they'll just form their own conference at some point. The ACC and the Big 12 really fell in quality quickly. They lost their best teams and the remaining ones like Clemson are just losing players to the better conferences more than ever now.

zambonir 2025-01-05 00:47:30 UTC #9

In the long run that is probably what happens, just a question of whether it gets done really soon with the next TV deal, or next time around. Probably the latter since there is still so much up in the air with the legal stuff.

Big 12 just isn't the same without Texas and Oklahoma (and A&M and Nebraska were already long gone) but Clemson didn't have to fall apart, their coach just couldn't get with the times. The Florida schools should still be okay but both them and the Texas teams really got hurt by nationalized recruiting.

If we actually get two good semi-finals it will be an improvement over the old format but if it had been the old format would a four-team bracket really have been any worse? Probably Notre Dame would have gotten in ahead of Texas or Penn State, with lots of noise about it, and Boise and SMU would have not been close. So in the end still a good thing despite the flawed seeding. Nobody ever expected a Go5 team to be one of the Top 4 seeds, that system was still designed for a viable Pac 12 (so you would have had Oregon and Ohio State or Penn State, plus Georgia, with ASU or Clemson as the weak conference champion but probably still ahead of Boise in the old system).