Two College Football Playoff duds offer a golden opportunity to complain
What a favor Tulane and James Madison did for the nation Saturday afternoon and Saturday evening. By winding up overmatched at Mississippi and Oregon, they allowed the populous observers of college football to engage in the treasured national pastime of impulsive whining. What manna.
Some people — hello — figured the overall level of complaining might decrease when the College Football Playoff field expanded from four teams to 12 beginning with the 2024 bracket. Instead, we’ve had two Decembers of expanded brackets and expanded complaining, the kind that wrings eternal meaning from tiny sample sizes. It’s almost as if the complaining has become a central feature of the overall event, right alongside video reviews and beer.
In 2024 the complaining centered around the scant excitement level of the four first-round games, when Notre Dame bested visiting Indiana 27-17 after leading 27-3; Penn State throttled visiting SMU 38-10; Texas pretty much eased past visiting Clemson 38-24 after leading 31-10; and Ohio State blasted visiting Tennessee 42-17. With two of the four games competitive this year — Alabama’s 34-24 comeback win at Oklahoma and Miami’s 10-3 victory in a fascinating scrounge for points at Texas A&M — the complaining turns to the playoff concept’s inclusion of the less-moneyed, less-recruited and less-talented Group of Five teams. Two years into the new system, the third weekend of December already seems established as a time to gather with loved ones, watch football and complain. How merry.
Now, for those who don’t follow a sport that has been broken for the past 156 years, with the brokenness often among its charms, the Group of Five is the lower tier of the top division of college football. It features five conferences plus independents, beneath the wealthier teams of the top rung (the Power Four). For the 10 years of the four-team playoff, the system did allow for the (small) possibility of a Group of Five team in that event, and it did save one slot for the top Group of Five team among the coveted New Year’s Six bowls, figuring this lent flavor and upheld an ethic of opportunity for all. One Group of Five team, Cincinnati in 2021, actually reached the playoff as the No. 4 seed, losing without embarrassment 27-6 to No. 1 Alabama, while nine Group of Five teams got those New Year’s Six bids in the other nine years and went a healthy 4-5 against their richer brethren.
Along came the 12-team format, which allowed one ironclad playoff spot for the Group of Five, except that this year it wound up permitting two — Tulane and James Madison — because of a provision allowing for the five highest-ranked conference champions and because the ACC champion (Duke, with five losses) didn’t quite make that list. This also happened to omit Notre Dame, whose athletic director began a campaign of whining that reestablished his school as a leading harbor of entitlement.
Come Saturday, visiting Tulane trailed Mississippi 17-3 at halftime and 41-3 later on before losing 41-10 and then visiting James Madison trailed Oregon 34-6 at halftime and 48-13 later on before losing 51-34. These were two duds even if they did have booming crowds and raucous settings and beer, and in a land that likes to evaluate its sports to shards, two duds make one topic.
“We were our conference champion, and the rules were what they were,” Tulane coach Jon Sumrall told reporters in Oxford after that game. “I think there should be access for at least one Group of Five team moving forward. I do. I think you should have given the American champion (Tulane) an opportunity before the ACC champion (Duke) because we beat the ACC champion (34-27 on Sept. 13). We beat them. So I do understand the gripe. By how we played tonight, we didn’t help, maybe, the critics of that, but I think there should at least be one Group of Five representative. But, you know, I’m not in charge of the playoff. I need to coach whatever team I’m coaching better than I did tonight.”
He’ll be coaching Florida of the Power Four next season, by virtue of being so good at coaching Tulane of the Group of Five.
Even before Saturday, loud voices such as those of ESPN analysts Nick Saban and Kirk Herbstreit suggested a narrowing of Group of Five playoff opportunities, arguing that the event should choose the best 12 teams. They did not mention that deciding upon the best certain number of teams in a sprawling sport has proved always, in every single season, for a century and more, impossible.
The wildly successful basketball March Madness never seeks to choose the best 68 teams, opting for a smorgasbord and hoping for upsets. That, in turn, ushers in a curious topic: Does the concept of football curb the likelihood of upsets in a way the concept of basketball does not? Certainly football has posted its treasured upsets through the years, from Boise State over Oklahoma in the 2006-07 Fiesta Bowl to Northern Illinois over Notre Dame in the 2024 regular season, with a smattering in between. It just lacks the abundance of names such as those that conjure goose-bump memories, as in St. Peter’s, George Mason, Fairleigh Dickinson, UMBC, Florida Gulf Coast, Loyola Chicago, VCU, Princeton …
One player can change most everything in basketball, as in the case of, say, the 2008 edition of Davidson.
In the case of James Madison vs. Oregon, the differences in speed and size kept glaring. The amazing Dukes, champions of the Sun Belt in just their second season of eligibility, ran a trick play that landed the ball in wide receiver Landon Ellis’s gut beyond the defense, but the defense caught up at the Oregon 10-yard line, and soon Oregon blocked a field goal. When Oregon’s Dierre Hill Jr. got to the left sideline on his 56-yard touchdown run and then accelerated, well, boom.
“We were just a little bit overpowered, for sure, on defense,” said James Madison’s Bob Chesney, who will coach UCLA next season. He said of the Ducks: “They’re fast. They’re big. They’re strong every which way on offense.” He said of the Dukes’ level, “It had to be elite to hang with them, and it just wasn’t.” And he concluded, “Yeah, I’d rather not get too deep into that question (about the Group of Five) because I don’t — yeah.”
He plausibly could have said what Sumrall had said earlier: “And we looked a little slow. And, yeah, some of that could be because they’re fast.”
In some years, the best Group of Five team can hang, as in those New Year’s Six bowl games when Boise State beat Arizona, Houston drilled Florida State, Central Florida beat Auburn, and Tulane edged USC. On Saturday, the less-privileged underlings looked like less-privileged underlings, and if that couldn’t provide stirring games, at least it lent the opportunity for whining.