For ages, certainly as long as we’ve been in the College Football Playoff era, people have politely asked and desperately requested, when will some freshmen finally take the place of blue bloods on college football’s biggest postseason stage?
Well, friends, the new age is officially the age of now.
The promise of a four-team CFP versus two-team Bowl Championship Series title game was to create more room for more teams to challenge the same old establishment. A year ago, the motivation behind expanding the playoff to a dozen teams was to open that door even wider and perhaps bring a little March Madness to college football.
It is working. At least for now, it is. And fittingly, it’s one basketball school that is leading this movement.
For the first time since the introduction of the CFP at the end of the 2014 season, the Final Four of the playoffs is not included in the lineup. alabama, Georgia, Ohio State Or CLEMSONAnd in those first 11 editions, any team that managed to break the big box déjà vu blockade of the Big Four to earn a spot in the semis or finals,,, well, they weren’t exactly George Mason ’06 or Loyola Chicago ’18,
Notre Dame Made it to the title match a year ago michiganThe race for the championship in 2023. But no one will mistake the Irish and Wolverines for UMBC and VCU. The closest we got to a true CFP Cinderella run TCU In 2022, when the Horned Frogs crashed the big ball in Los Angeles, Georgia took their glass slipper and beat them on their horned heads 65-7.
However, this year’s unlikely foursome — with ole miss faced with miami Thursday night and Indiana taking on oregon on Friday – guaranteed to bring us a new era champion, no matter who stands atop the stage at Hard Rock Stadium on January 19th. And it would be the boldest new-blood game not only of the CFP era, but of almost the entire BCS era that began in 1998. Or, to be honest, there would even be the Bowl Alliance, Bowl Coalition or just plain old Bowl era which is more than a century old.
No matter your age, you know Indiana has never had a golden age of football until now. No offense to Coach Corso and the 1979 Holiday Bowl champions or Von Dunbar and the 1991 Copper Bowl winners or even Antwaan Randle-El and Anthony Thompson, but this really is as good as what came before. The good people of Bloomington were content to make the Irish the state’s football school by giving them an occasional loan PurdueWhile everyone was waiting for the hoops season to finally end.
IU has fielded football teams since 1887, but the Hoosiers had not posted double-digit wins in a season until the previous two years and had not won a Big Ten title since 1945, nor had they won the Big Ten Championship Game or the Rose Bowl for the previous six weeks. Should they win it all, someone will have to tell the kids of the 1954 Milan High Indians and Jimmy Chitwood’s Hickory Huskers that they are no longer the biggest underdog story in “Hoosiers” history.
If you’re of a certain age, you may remember when Oregon was really bad at football. As was the case for most of the 20th century. From 1893 to 1993, the Ducks made exactly three Rose Bowl trips, two of which were before 1920. They won seven conference championships, but six of them were shared with other teams; Their only outright title came in the four-game Oregon Intercollegiate Football Association campaign of 1895. When they made it to the 1992 Paul Weed Eater Independence Bowl, it was a big deal… and they lost that game to Wake Forest.
But the revolutionary football development that followed, promoted by Oregon graduate Phil Knight and the small shoe company he started on the Eugene campus at the time, was every bit the equal of what Indiana was doing. They rolled a battleship into a bathtub. But for all the dapper Dayglo Ducks we’ve known since then — from Joey Harrington’s giant likeness in Times Square and Marcus Mariota’s 2014 Heisman win to Chip Kelly, Earth’s funniest mascot and those punky uniform combinations — Oregon has yet to win a national title, despite two appearances in the BCS/CFP Finals, the last time Mariota was under center a decade ago.
If you’re of Gen But your children and grandchildren have never seen the Miami Hurricanes on college football’s biggest stage. Unless you’ve shown them the Canes’ Dynasty 30 for 30 movies on the ESPN app or you’ve shown them standard definition footage of Ed Reed, Jeremy Shockey & Co. winning the 2001 BCS title (thanks to Larry Coker), they only know Miami football as the embodiment of #goacc.
“The You Is Back!” Lots of pre-season predictions. The ibis ends up flat on its back in the Everglades mud with Sebastian. What was Miami’s biggest postseason win since beating Nebraska on that January night in Pasadena – back when the ‘Canes were still members of the Big East? 2016 Russell Athletic Bowl?
And speaking of eras, unless you were a student at Ole Miss during the Space Age, you may have never seen the Rebels fit for an actual championship ring. Fact: There is no college football Saturday experience as glorious as strolling through The Grove with a red Solo cup in hand. The best food served by the most beautiful people under tents plucked straight from the house decorated under magnolia trees taken straight from Southern Living magazine. We all know about Archie and Eli Manning, Deuce McAllister and Jackson Dart.
But here’s the fact: When you walk into Vought-Hemingway Stadium, the first thing you notice is how well dressed everyone is. Then you realize how bare the stadium walls are when it comes to addressing a program’s championship season. 2003 SEC West Co-Division Champion? 1963 SEC Champion? The ’62 national champions, a title awarded to the Rebels by the Litkenhaus difference by the score rating system (we’re not making this up!) while USC was declared champion by the major polls? The Rebels’ last championship was their third in four years, but it was won so long ago that Johnny Watt, whose name adorns their stadium, was still the coach, and JFK was in the White House.
The purpose of this four-part, four-team history lesson is not to emphasize those programs’ long struggles to establish themselves in college football’s most elite room, or to return to that room after a generational absence, or to finally be able to take care of business once they got there.
The point of dissecting the statistical pain of this year’s playoff survivors is to give us proper perspective on what it would mean for a team that emerges from this strange quartet to ultimately hoist the major gold trophy. Additionally, to fully recognize the receipt of the highly anticipated postseason team transfusion.
You all are asking for it. Well, now we’ve got it. The new era of new CFP blood has arrived. Now enjoy it, folks, because 156 years of college football history tells us that blue bloods never stay out of power for long. Then again, that same history might have tried to tell us that this quadrangle was never going to happen in the first place. And that’s why, as semifinal kickoff approaches, it looks like this, yes, could be one for the ages.
