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The champion this CFP deserves
The Ohio State Buckeyes embody both the strengths and the weaknesses of the playoff system that crowned them.
If you’re someone who pines for the way that college football used to be, Ohio State is the perfect reflection of the flaws in the new playoff format.
The Buckeyes lost their two most significant regular-season games. They did not even play for their conference’s championship, let alone win it. They are the first team with two losses to be crowned as a national champion.
However, if you’re someone who is inclined to believe the expanded playoff is an improvement on the previous system, well, Ohio State is proof of that, too.
Ohio State beat six of the top eight teams in the final college-football playoff rankings. They defeating Indiana and Penn State in the regular season before beating Tennessee, Oregon, Texas and Notre Dame in the playoffs. Kind of hard to argue that the Buckeyes weren’t the best team in college football.
That makes the Buckeyes the absolute perfect champion for this moment. A team that reflects the best AND the worst aspects of the drastic reorganization that has taken place in college football.
I will also admit to finding humor in the fact that if this season were played according to last year’s playoff format, there’s a non-zero chance that Ohio State coach would have fired Ryan Day after the Buckeyes lost to Michigan. Less than two months later, he won the sport’s biggest prize, and one USA Today writer suggested he should leave and go to the NFL.
I don’t see Ohio State as an undeserving national champion. I also don’t think their four-game run elevates them above previous winners, either. Not even the Colorado team that needed five downs against Missouri to get half of that national title the Buffalos shared with Georgia Teach.
What Ohio State’s title run does embody, however, is the triumph of television and its desire for programming over the underlying framework of the sport that I grew up watching.
It used to be that to win a national championship in college football, you had to walk a tight-rope for three full months. If you slipped, you lost your chance at the title unless it happened very early and then you might still have a shot. Maybe. But only if some other teams fell.
That era is over. Gone. Buried. It’s not coming back.
Now? You just need to get to the playoff. Any way, any how. And in that regard, being part of either the Big Ten or the SEC is more important than winning either the Big Ten or the SEC. You get in, you can go on a run.
College football is certainly not the first sport to expand its playoff format with an eye toward increasing excitement and/or revenue. Prior to 1969, baseball’s only playoff series was the World Series. In 1993, there were only four teams who reached the postseason as each league was composed of two divisions, the winners of those two divisions would play in a League Championship Series to decide who would advance to play in the World Series.
Today, 12 teams make the postseason, six from each league. That means 40 percent of Major League teams qualify for the playoffs each year. The fact that the Mariners can’t consistently stumble their way into that 40 percent is a source of both misery and interest to me, but I’m not going to discuss further now.
The expanded playoffs have devalued the importance of a successful regular season.
Winning 100 games used to really mean something. Not because it was some magical number, but because winning 100 games meant that you were likely to win your division – or before that – your league. You needed to do that to get to the postseason.
Now, winning 100 games will certainly get you into the playoffs, but so will winning 95 games. The postseason is what matters most.
On the other hand, the NFL playoffs have expanded, too, and it hasn’t diluted either the importance of the regular season nor the way we view the team that wins the Super Bowl. Perhaps it’s because professional football has used a single-elimination playoff to decide its champion since 1933. Maybe it’s because of how the merger unfolded in the late 1960s, culminating in the creation of the Super Bowl. Whatever the reason, the expansion of the NFL playoffs feels more consistent with the sport’s history than the college football playoffs. Or at least it does to me.


I found the definitive explanation behind one of the greatest urban myths in Seattle sports.
Wait. I’m making that sound like I actually did something here, when all I did was find a YouTube video of John Olerud talking about Rickey Henderson.
Specifically, Olerud was talking about an oft-cited story in which Henderson — after signing with the Mariners in 2000 — reported to the team and asked the team’s first baseman why he wore a helmet while playing in the field.
Well, Olerud supposedly said, it was due to a brain aneurysm he suffered in college, and he wore the helmet for additional protection.
Henderson then remarked that was the exact same circumstance that had befallen a guy he’d played with in New York as a member of the Mets the previous year.
“Yeah, Rickey,” Olerud supposedly responded. “That was me. I played with you in New York.”
Olerud has always been adamant that this never occurred. But back in 2018 — at an event put on by the Baseball Writers of America Association — he explained the actual origin:
Scott Lawrenson — an assistant trainer — had a very dry sense of humor, and he told the story to a couple of guys in the clubhouse, and it circulated partly because it was so funny and partly because it sounded like something that Henderson would do. Or at least something that was consistent with the public image constructed around Henderson as someone with a tendency to speak of himself in the third person.
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