Month: December 2016

…the traditional reflection on what if there’s no playoff and bowl tie-ups are as they were when I was in high school at the end of the college football season.  Without further ado:

SUGAR BOWL: ALABAMA vs OHIO STATE. This basically becomes the de facto national title game, and it’s tough to quibble with it.

ROSE BOWL: PENN STATE vs WASHINGTON. This is the game to see who gets a bite if Alabama loses but Ohio State is unconvincing. If one of these teams blows the other out, 

ORANGE BOWL: CLEMSON vs OKLAHOMA. None of the Florida teams are strong enough to displace Clemson by a long shot, and Oklahoma is the best of the old Big 8 teams (which are carrying the “Big” “12” at this point).

COTTON BOWL: OKLAHOMA STATE vs MICHIGAN. A hell of a matchup occasioned by the fact that the B1G is as topheavy as the SEC isn’t (Seriously, Auburn backs into the Sugar Bowl in our world? Tennessee had a shot at doing so? Are you kidding me with this shit?)

FIESTA BOWL: WISCONSIN vs USC. The leftover bowl gets the Best Of The Rest and this should be entertaining, if nothing else. (Seriously, the B1G is out of control.)

PEACH BOWL, SINCE APPARENTLY THE BOWL WHERE VANDY PLAYED TEXAS TECH IN 1974 IS A BIG DEAL NOW: COLORADO vs FLORIDA STATE, because who gives a shit.

Now, here’s the twist: if you go back to the actual conference alignments, that means Penn State is out of the Rose Bowl.  In that case, you get Bama vs Penn State and Ohio State vs Washington, and a situation where if Penn State wins, the Rose Bowl winner has a case to make for a national title. Plus, Ohio State is your B1G champ. It’s also possible that since the Orange Bowl tie-up was the Big 8 and not the ACC, you might just get Bama-Clemson in a straight fight. Point being: there is one undefeated Power 4+1 team, and none of the other contenders have a clear-cut case why they deserve the spot more than the other two. So, how is this situation any better than it was in 1990? Now we get two games to a finish, and if you’re a power conference team with one loss you’re free-rolled in – although actually winning that conference, or your head-to-head record, no longer matter.

Other thoughts:

1) The case for SEC supremacy is kind of feeble given that the second-best team ranked out at 14. Meanwhile, the B1G has 4 teams in the top 8. The delta between the SEC’s top and second teams in the playoff rankings is the largest of any conference. Alabama may be the Death Star, but the rest of the league is thirteen stormtroopers.

2) The Ol’ Bald Poach got Penn State to the Rose Bowl. There is no god but Loki in college football.

3) In the playoff top 25: Western Michigan, Pitt, Temple, Navy. Not in the top 25: any team from the entire old Southwest Conference. No Texas, no Aggie, no Houston or Texas Tech. Not for nothing did I use “Power 4+1” – take West Virginia out, which makes NO sense, and the “Big” “12” has all of two teams in the top 25. 

 

Compared to years past, the B1G is the new SEC, the SEC is the new Big XII, and the “Big” “12” is the new Big East. We’re starting to see the outline materializing for four sixteen-team superconferences and a possible path forward. And if your conference title and head to head record is less important than your overall standings…you’re in the NFL. Might not be the worst outcome.

2000 was my third Christmas without my father. It was the second one spent in Alabama. I was single, and the Christmas season had just begun to make that feel like it might not be a good thing. And it wasn’t like past holidays, because my two closest high school friends had decamped to farther climes – so the old days of coming back and hanging out were done. 

It was a tough time to be back home, fraught with memory and the realization that nothing would be the same. My brother was newly divorced and his one kid was less than two years old – not much to relate to. The whole house was awash in a dark cloud, and that was before taking into account the effects of the election. It was a cold, sad, grim week of sitting around waiting and wondering what the new world looked like. And Christmas Day was the worst – you unwrap presents, such as they are, you eat your biscuits and strawberries and watch the Blue-Gray Game, and then it’s 3 PM and there’s precious little to do but sit and be miserable and hope that someone – in a world where cellphones mostly don’t do SMS, wifi is almost nonexistent and social media as we know it IS nonexistent, where you need a laptop and a cable to plug it into when at home – will be online to chat. 

But I gutted it out, got on the plane  the next day and flew home to Northern Virginia. And remarkably, when I got there, I had communication from my two best friends in DC: we’re going down the pub. And so that night, I was with my friends in the Irish public house of our frequency, knocking down pints and singing along, and we had a grand old time. 

It’s a useful reminder: you never know where life is going to go in the month after Christmas, and sometimes you just need to get by with a little help from your friends.