Late Monday night in Los Angeles, in a swirl of confetti and champagne and Herbstreit, the University of Georgia was minted as college football’s new overlord. The Bulldogs unleashed unspeakable horrors on the helpless Horned Frogs of TCU in a 65-7 bludgeoning that wasn’t as close as the score indicated, thereby delivering Georgia’s inebriated fan base a second consecutive national title.
And it looks like we’re in for more of the same next year. Have you peeked at Georgia’s 2023 schedule? Let me save you the trouble and just encourage you to prepare to live in a world where the Bulldogs have three-peated.
We need bad guys, to an extent.
Look, every sport needs a villain. Baseball has the Yankees, college basketball has Duke, youth karate has Cobra Kai. But the bad guys’ success must happen in measured doses or things become predictable and boring.
We prefer that our sports follow a Hollywood formula where the villain builds a tower of success that is eventually toppled by our hero’s righteousness and the bad guy’s hubris. The villain can have his fun for a while, but eventually the little guys must prevail. “Jaws” wouldn’t have been a great movie if the shark just chomped everyone and swam back out to sea. (OK that would have been sort of awesome but you get my point.)
College football is nearing the dreaded “aw, c’mon” stage, where one team’s dominance sucks the fun out of the sport. We were already burned out by Alabama’s prolonged success, and now Georgia has stepped up to hog the glory1.
What can be done about this?
Major changes have been made to college football the last few years, but the sport remains as top heavy as ever. The transfer portal has been a net benefit to Georgia, as they have lost some backups but added other teams’ stars. The “name, image and likeness” movement has also helped Georgia’s cause; Bulldog football players had signed a whopping 95 NIL deals as of last summer. Those tools were supposed to level the playing field but the rich just keep getting richer.
But there is one more change coming, and it just may save us. It will add a new factor to the mix, one that is the single greatest threat to anyone entrenched in a position of power and dominance:
Chaos.
Help is on the way.
You know how your mom said that you could be anything you wanted to be in the whole wide world, even President of the United States, but so far the only secret service you have is getting DoorDash Taco Bell at 2am? College football is like that.
In theory each of the 131 college teams starts the season with a chance to win it all, but the reality is that only a handful of bluebloods get invited to the four-team playoff. In the nine years the playoff has existed, only 14 different schools have received the 36 available bids. Five of them (Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State, Notre Dame and Oklahoma) have hoarded at least three invites each. The college football playoff is an exclusive club and the selection committee has done a nice job of keeping out the riffraff.
But those days will soon be over. Beginning in the 2024 season, the playoff will expand from four teams to 12, meaning teams like Georgia will need to win three or four games to take home the trophy2.
That may not seem like a big deal, but any time college kids play a football game they have a new chance to lose. Footballs have a weird shape — they take goofy bounces and can be tricky to throw, so turnovers are always just a play away. Weather and injuries can sneak up and become a factor without notice.
The more games that are played, the more opportunities for luck and chaos to intervene and deliver an underdog its day in the sun.
Sure, a tiny tournament may be more suitable for crowning the “best” team, but only college football people care about that stuff. If you ask an NFL fan who the “best” pro team is, you’ll get a puzzled look (and possibly thrown onto a card table) because in the NFL — like all sports other than college football — all that matters is winning the playoff. It doesn’t matter how a team got there or if they deserve it or if they are the “best” team. The point of a tournament is to have fun and declare a winner, not run a science experiment.
Georgia will add another title to its stack next year. If they do unexpectedly stumble, another blueblood will slide in to replace them, because that’s how the current tiny playoff is constructed.
But after next year, more Davids will get a shot at Goliath. Today only three teams have a chance to knock off the #1 seed; 11 feels like more of a fair fight.
There will be chaos, and it will save us.
The following appeared in The Athletic on November 24, 2017. David’s letter is a cautionary tale about failing to enjoy the good times while you’re having them. I hope David is having more fun now that his team is losing games again.
Dear Faux Pelini,
I am a graduate and fan of The University of Alabama. The problem is, we win every game. We are favored to win every game. It’s just not fun anymore. What can I do to make college football fun again?
David J.
Dear David,
First of all, WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.
I hate your question.
Nobody will ever feel bad for you, but you are indeed in an unpleasant place. You have reached a special level of sports hell where the joy of winning is much weaker than the pain of losing. This is what happens when you reach the top of the mountain — there’s nowhere to go but down.
The thing about being at the apex of the football world is that it starts to feel like the natural order of things, like it will always be this way. But it always, always ends. Always.
So this era will end for Alabama — we don’t know how or when, but it will happen. Nick Saban will leave, other teams will get better and your recruiting classes will no longer be filled with large mutants who can throw an oak tree through a goalpost.
You are living in the Good Ol’ Days. You will talk about these teams and these games for the rest of your life, and you’ll realize you sort of took them for granted while they were happening.
So, don’t take them for granted.
Go back and revisit the dark years. Watch old tapes, read old articles. Those seasons weren’t so long ago, after all. Hell, Alabama lost seven games in 2006 and six games in 2007.
Trust me — in 20 years you’ll wish you could go back and sit through a random game in 2017 and relive that dominance again. So the next time Alabama plays, watch the game as 2037 You and not 2017 You. You’ll feel better about things.
People are already telling Nick Saban to his sad face that The Alabama Era is over.
In the 60s and 70s college basketball had a huge dynasty problem when UCLA won 10 titles in 12 seasons, but expanding the tournament from 16 to 68 teams helped solve that.