It took more than 100 years, a few billion dollars and the cold, hard realization that you can’t fight progress forever. And now, finally, college football has what the rest of sports have — a legitimate postseason tournament.
The first 12-team College Football Playoff kicks off Friday and Saturday with four first-round games on campuses steeped in gridiron tradition: Texas (hosting Clemson), Penn State (SMU), Notre Dame (Indiana) and Ohio State (Tennessee).
The winners advance to play over the New Year's holiday — Arizona State, Boise State, Georgia and Oregon are waiting — and the tournament concludes Jan. 20 with the national title game in Atlanta.
The concept of a postseason tournament is old hat for virtually every other major sport in the United States (including the lower levels of college football), but this postseason is a novel one for the top level of the game. Not surprisingly for an endeavor that took a century to create, it is teeming with prickly details that will ultimately shape the future of the playoff itself.
Can the college game compete with the NFL?
A deal struck decades ago as part of the NFL's anti-trust exemption deems Saturdays as college territory, prohibiting the league from televising games on college football's biggest day. But that ban is only in effect through mid-December, which is when the NFL jumps in.
On Saturday, it has a pair of standout games: Texans-Chiefs on NBC and Steelers-Ravens on Fox. The CFP has chosen to counterprogram those games with SMU-Penn State and Clemson-Texas, both of which were sublicensed to TNT as part of ESPN's original deal to broadcast the playoff.
How will this go? College football's most-watched game this season grabbed 16.6 million viewers, while last year's title game, when the playoff only consisted of four teams, drew 25 million.
A regular-season NFL game between the Bills and Rams earlier this month drew 24 million viewers and the NFL averaged around 38.5 million viewers for its first round of playoff games last season.
Does it matter? ESPN is signed to the deal (topping out at $1.3 billion a year) through 2031, though if the ratings tank, it might be compelled to look for friendlier TV windows and avoid the ratings behemoth that is the NFL.
“I think it's important for them to get a reasonable rating,” said Dan Durbin, the director of the Institute of Sports, Media and Society at USC. “I don't think beating the NFL really even counts.”
Why did this take 100 years?
We can trace it back to the Rose Parade in Pasadena, California. Organizers of the annual parade wanted a way to pay for all those flower-covered floats cruising down Colorado Boulevard.
In 1902, they invited Michigan and Stanford to play (the Wolverines won 49-0). In 1916, it was Washington State and Brown, and from there, the game became an annual affair.
Other cities followed suit, mostly in warm-weather areas. By 1937, the Rose, Orange (Miami), Sugar (New Orleans) and Cotton (Dallas) were annual bowls. By the 1940s and '50s, the games had contractual tie-ins with conferences, which pledged to send their teams there.
The games entrenched themselves in the local tourism economy and, so, also became dug into the fabric of college football itself. While virtually all sports had moved toward some sort of playoff tournament by the 1960s, college football stood pat and the bowl games served as its postseason.
AP and other polls declared national champions for decades
The Associated Press started its poll of sports writers in 1936 and began awarding its national championship to whoever was ranked first at the end of each season. In 1968, the AP moved its final poll to after the bowls were over.
Other polls followed — more than 20 different systems or rankings have come and gone since the late 1800s — and for decades, those organizations crowned national champions. They often differed, including 11 seasons where AP and the coaches/UPI polls declared different champions.
Because the bowl games were locked into inviting teams from certain conferences, the top two teams in the sport often never played each other.
“In college football, you had so many teams, so many conferences that it’s just been unwieldy to try to create a real postseason,” Durbin said.
The alphabet soup of determining a champion
That remains true to this day, even with the expanded playoffs.
The seeds of change were planted after back-to-back seasons with split titles in 1990 and 1991 made it clear something needed to be done. Over the ensuing 35 years, a cocktail of conference realignment, ever-growing TV contracts and, most recently, the financial realities of a sport that will soon share millions with its players spawned new ways for the sport to tackle its playoff problem.
In the 1990s, a two-decade period of systems — the Bowl Alliance, Bowl Coalition and Bowl Championship Series — tried to pair the two best teams in the country to play for the title. Rankings were based on a combination of polls, computer rankings and strength of schedule — a formula that has been tweaked many times but remains a sore spot to this day.
The beginnings of a ‘real’ playoff
The BCS turned into the College Football Playoff in 2014 with a four-team postseason that felt like progress.
One problem was that the gap grew even wider between what mattered and what didn't — three playoff games vs. dozens of bowl games that looked more and more like exhibitions, especially if players with NFL prospects opted out.
Another was the selection process. The March Madness selection committee in college basketball isn't truly in jeopardy of sidelining the eventual national champion if it makes a bad choice for, say, the last two teams in a 68-team field.
Not so in football, where the field is smaller, every game means more and the financial stakes are higher. The SEC and Big Ten, for instance, receive around $22 million in playoff TV money before a single game is played. There is a pool of about $115 million available to the conferences based on the results of the playoff.
Last year, when the football committee chose one-loss Alabama over undefeated Florida State for the fourth and final spot, it triggered investigations and threats.
The road to 12 teams was already paved by then, but it has been equally as fraught. Some reveled in the fact that the first team out of the bracket this time was the very Alabama program that was chosen a year earlier.
Will this work, and what might change soon?
There is also the issue of automatic bids that go to conference winners, which have not only put Boise State and Arizona State (teams ranked eighth and 10th in the latest AP Top 25) into the tournament but given them two of the four first-round byes.
There is the issue of travel — how many fans can afford to go to three neutral-site games to watch their team chase a championship? With scant time to prepare, can the schools and the CFP pull off campus games without a hitch? Oh, what about the lack of students on campus this week?
The eventual champion will also end up playing 16, maybe 17, games, carving into classroom time that's supposed to still mean something at the college level.
Within a year or two, this tournament will likely expand to 14 teams. The issue of “access” — which conferences get in and how many teams they are allowed — will top that debate. There is also growing separation between the SEC and Big Ten and the rest of college football that makes many in the sport uneasy.
Before all that, it's time to buckle up. College football's first wild ride through the playoffs will last a full month.