Barnhouse: And the monkeying around only continues with the CFP playoff selections

Guest column time on how we got to where we currently are in the "final four".

2023 National Championship Game – Getty

NOTE FROM BOB: We don’t do many guest columns, but when a SturmStack subscriber is also a guy I’ve read for years for his great coverage of college sports, well, it was a no-brainer to hear what he had to say. Very excited that Mr Barnhouse pitched a column and even happier to see what you all think!

By Wendell Barnhouse

Sunday marked the end of an era for college football when the 10-year-old College Football Playoff selected its last four-team field.

As you might have heard, the 13-member committee meeting at the Gaylord Hotel in Grapevine, Texas was faced with a Solomonic/”Sophie’s Choice” decision. It had to select four teams when five teams were worthy.

If you spent Sunday in an isolation chamber, you missed the caterwauling/pearl clutching/screaming fits. The noise came from Tallahassee, Florida, from certain ESPN debaters and from several college football writers who expressed their angst/displeasure/disgust via a social media site known as X/Twitter.

Florida State was left out (oh, the humanity) becoming the first undefeated Power Five champion to miss the CFP. It’s also the last time that will ever happen.

The Seminoles (13-0) won a pitifully ugly Atlantic Coast Conference title game Saturday night. Michigan (13-0, Big Ten champion), Washington (13-0, Pac-12 champion), Texas (12-1, Big 12 champion) and Alabama (12-1, Southeastern Conference champion after beating CFP No. 1 and two-time defending champion Georgia) were the four teams chosen to play off for this season’s national title.

The CFP’s decision came down to choosing Bama over FSU. From this side of the keyboard, the correct decision was made. The Seminoles are crippled. Star quarterback Jordan Travis is on crutches after suffering a compound fracture in Game No. 11, a non-conference victory over North Alabama on Nov. 18.

Let’s call it The Butterfly Effect. One horrific injury on a 13-yard scramble in a relatively meaningless game started the chaos theory that evolved over the weekend with the outcomes of Washington edging Oregon, Bama upsetting Georgia and Florida State refusing to fold. The Seminoles, playing its third-team QB, slipped past an inept Louisville team that somehow won 10 games.

The CFP committee’s binary choice of an SEC champion over a wounded ACC champion will be argued for the next month and perhaps referenced as an all-time travesty. The committee was not at fault. They had to decide and choose four teams when five teams were deserving. A year from now, the committee won’t have that problem. They’ll seed and bracket a 12-team field.

Chaos theory could be the title of every college football season. If you love the sport, you embrace the weekly craziness as players 18 to their early 20s play like gods one week and frauds the next. Mix in fan bases who are swaddled in team colors at birth and often allow their fandom to offer up stories worthy of “SVU: Criminal Intent.”

The changes in college football over the past four decades have come at light speed. Billion-dollar TV contracts, million-dollar coaching contracts (and buyouts), schools changing conferences causing conferences to disappear, players transferring while chasing Name/Image/Licensing paydays are just some of the mutations.

But 40 years ago, a post-season playoff to – gasp, horrors, decide a champion on the field – was like politics and religion. You did not discuss a “playoff” in polite company.

Your veteran (now retired) scribe observed and wrote about most of what’s happened. To understand how we arrived at Sunday’s “Succession”-like decision of who got in and why one was left out, we need to understand the history – both musty and recent – of college football’s post-season.

From the start, college football has been managed – or more accurately, mismanaged – by power brokers with selfish interests and highly questionable judgment and foresight. It has been (and still is, to some extent) like having 100 monkeys on keyboards trying to replicate “War and Peace.”

The bowl system started more than 100 years ago. Civic leaders in tourist destination cities believed that staging college football post-season contests would entice fans of the schools to board trains and visit Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, and the West Coast.

The Rose Bowl, the Grandaddy of Them All (because it was the first bowl game), is staged in Pasadena, a Los Angeles suburb. The facility is nestled in a valley created by the picture postcard San Gabriel Mountains. The “Tournament of Roses Parade” is staged on New Year’s Day as a pre-game commercial for a town that is otherwise nondescript.

If you take away nothing else from this story, take this opinion from your veteran scribe who believes it as fact:

The evolution and development of college football’s post-season over the last 20 years has been waylaid and delayed by the hidebound “tradition” of the Rose Bowl being played on the afternoon of New Year’s Day so a parade of 40 floats covered in flowers can be staged the morning of the game. The sport has trashed dozens of traditions, but the Rose Bowl “tradition” has been sacrosanct, preventing the college football’s post-season from sane, natural progress.

There was a time when you could count the number of bowl games on the fingers of both hands. The New Year’s Day bowls – Rose, Sugar, Orange, Cotton – typically attracted the best matchups. The bowls had contracts with the top conferences to host their champions. Big Ten and Pac-8 to the Rose, SEC to the Sugar, Big Eight to the Orange and Southwest Conference to the Cotton.

The Sugar, Orange and Cotton would invite the best available opponents and some of those “wild card” invites were extended before teams completed their regular seasons (remember, monkeys banging keyboards).

For decades, one of the sport’s top attractions refused to sully itself. Notre Dame, which still clings to its independent status (a topic for another 1,000 words at another time), played in the 1925 Rose Bowl and then declined to participate until 1970. The Fighting Irish were sweet-talked into joining the modern world by the Cotton Bowl’s Jim “Hoss” Brock, who could sell ice to Eskimos. (Brock called everybody “hoss” or “hoss-ette.”)

“National champions” were decided by polls/rankings (monkeys, again). Some of those had their final voting before the bowls were played. And if the top two ranked teams were from the SEC or the Big Eight, they were contractually obligated to the Sugar and Orange and couldn’t face off. (Damn those monkeys.)

In 1968, The Associated Press started having its pollsters vote after the bowl games to decide who was No. 1. That “progress” was just another version of the beauty pageant as only six times over the next three decades did the top two ranked teams meet thanks to happenstance.

In the 1990s, the sport went biblical as the Bowl Coalition begat the Bowl Alliance begat the Bowl Championship Series. The BCS debuted in 1998 and matched the nation’s top two teams based on a formula that melded computer rankings with the media/coaches polls. While neither a series nor a playoff, the imperfect BCS at least matched two teams that were relatively worthy and actually played a game to decide a national champion.

It’s worth noting the Coalition and the Alliance didn’t include teams from the Big Ten and the Pac-10… because Rose Bowl (also because: a parade of 40 floats covered in flowers.)

The BCS was an imperfect solution, but it nudged the powers that be closer to using the “p word.” In the early 2010s, the baby took its first steps with the College Football Playoff while keeping the tradition and money of the bowl system alive.

The CFP selected six bowls – Rose, Sugar, Orange, Cotton, Fiesta, and Peach – which rotate the honor of hosting the semifinals and final with the other bowls that host New Year’s Six (bowls for teams like Florida State, which will face Georgia in the Orange Bowl.)

The four-team playoff that debuted in 2014 meant that five conferences (Big 12, Big Ten, ACC, SEC, Pac-12) played musical chairs (preferred song: The Beatles’ “Long and Winding Road”) with one league left with its nose pressed on the outside of the windowpane.

The logical solution – alas, “logic” and “college football” are a classic non sequitur – was to be inclusive and expand the playoff field. The task of developing an expanded playoff fell to a sub-committee: SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick. In 2019, they began a series of meetings and discussions on top of their “day jobs” which were complicated by the pandemic. Eight, 10, 12, 16 team brackets were considered.

In June of 2021, a 12-team format was announced, and it was fast tracked. Unlike the plodding nature of past decisions, the sport decided the sooner, the better. After all, the idea of playoffs was now acceptable. (Cue a Lee Corso “not so fast my friend” sound byte).

In July of 2021, Texas and Oklahoma announced they would leave the Big 12 for the SEC. Bowlsby – who had spent many hours working alongside Sankey on the playoff puzzle - was blindsided (back stabbed?), along with all of college football.

The commissioners of the Big Ten (Kevin Warren), Pac-12 (George Kliavkoff) and ACC (Jim Phillips) were all newcomers to their jobs. They sensed that Sankey and the SEC were staging a clandestine post-season power grab. The three commissioners hastily formed a handshake alliance. That threw sand in the gears, creating warring factions that sidetracked any chance of the 12-team playoff being instituted before 2024.

Yes, boys and girls, if everyone had showed trust and played nice, we could have had a 12-team playoff this season.

Sidebar on the alliance threesome: In the summer of 2022, Warren OK’d the Big Ten adding USC and UCLA which led to the Pac-12’s demise and left Kliavkoff without a conference or a job. (Nice alliance ya got there; shame if anything happens to it.) Warren then bailed on the Big Ten for a front office gig with the Chicago Bears.

Phillips, who hoped the alliance would lead to an overall assessment of the state of college football, is overseeing a league with a 13-0 champion screaming that life isn’t fair.

Yes, life isn’t fair and for most fans, college football is life. Florida State beat two SEC schools in non-conference, went 12-0 in the regular season and won its conference title game. The Seminoles did everything required to make the four-team bracket – except keeping their star quarterback healthy. As was evidenced in the offense-challenged ACC championship game, if you ain’t got a quarterback, you ain’t got a chance.

All the bitching and moaning and statements bashing the CFP process are nothing more than Darrens and Karens yelling for the manager. Phillips, the ACC commissioner, issued a statement that ended with: “My heart breaks for the talented FSU student-athletes and coaches and their passionate and loyal fans. Florida State deserved better. College football deserved better."

Yeah, well, Jimbo your inexperience and suspicion plus two other rookie commissioners formed a silly, worthless alliance that helped tap the brakes on a 12-team playoff which would have included Florida State.

College football does deserve better. It just keeps monkeying around.

The author retired in early 2020 after 45 years as a sportswriter. He spent 25 of those at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram covering national college basketball (23 Final Fours) and national college football (15 national championships.)