By Mark Blaudschun
The 2024 college football season is now part of the history books--and it was an historic season.
The main new ingredient was the newly minted 12-team playoff system, which ended on January 20th with Ohio State's 34-23 victory over Notre Dame.
And you know what, it worked.
Not perfectly, of course.
There will always be a few glitches and there will always be criticism about the way things were done or about the outcome.
But overall, the damn thing worked nearly flawlessly, from start to finish
College football needed a change after a dozen years of BCS four-team football, which looked to many critics like a Southeastern Conference block party.
Georgia, Alabama, LSU, Auburn, Florida all have been leading characters. And what was a national championship game without an SEC participant or maybe even two.
Not last season. And not this season
And, no, the SEC will still play football next season and be a major factor.
But this season, we had Oregon ranked No. 1 for most of the season, we had Ohio State on top early and late and we had a Notre Dame revival to the spotlight dance.
We also didn't have CFB's coaching G.O.A.T. Alabama coach Nick Saban, who made his calls from the comfy confines of the ESPN Game Day set. (He's pretty good there as well).
But we had drama almost every week .
We had a wildly entertaining regular season where one loss didn't eliminate you from the four-team playoff pool.
Nor did two losses. We had meaninngful games in the newly configured Big 12 going down to almost the last play of the regular season before the conference championship game match-up was set.
We had the revival of Army and Navy.
We had Cinderella teams like Indiana and Arizona State.
We had a return to the glory days of SMU.
We had first-round games on campus sites, which created a festive atmosphere which set the tone for the entire extended playoff format which stretched the season to late January.
Yes, there was a down side.
The significance of conference championship games are tumbling and will continue to falter. Not one conference champion reached the semifinals.
The one major flaw which must be corrected sooner rather than later is the rewarding of byes.
But the CFP, which wants to give conference champions all sorts of advantages-basically an anti-Notre Dame rule.
The CFP screwed this one up. It didn't give byes to its four highest ranked teams. It gave them to its four highest ranked conference champions, which allowed Boise State and Arizona State to get a bye while Notre Dame and Ohio State were forced to play a first round game.
Even worse was No. 1 seed Oregon facing No. 8 seed Ohio State in a quarterfinal game.
The CFP folks say they will look at the first year and tweak it if they must.
Early indications are they won't do anything, which would be a mistake since changing the bye format is a simple fix.
The format will change, after next season with the most likely move being an expansion to 16 teams, which will mean NO byes and eight first-round games played on campus sites, with four quarterfinal New Year's Eve-Day games creating a spectacular spotlight for CFB.
There will be further adjustments made. Starting the season earlier and ending it later is coming. So too are more rules and regulations regarding the transfer portal and Name, Image and Licensing issues which now makes college football players quasi employees of the schools they represent.
Let's be clear, CFB is now NFL-lite.
But that is a topic for a different time, which will be ongoing.
For now, let's bask in the warmth of a college football season which was in so many ways the best we've seen in a generation.
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