Ohio St. Fiesta Bowl bound

The College Football Playoff committee had to justify the champion of the best conference not qualifying while another Big Ten team did, with Penn State out and Ohio State in, but in the end, the break was clean between the playoff quartet and multi-loss teams. It could be found as high as Alabama minus-16.5 in the offshore market and is the largest line of any College Football Playoff matchup to date.

The Crimson Tide is the only team to make the playoff in each of the three years of its existence.

Meyer has said in the past that his teams can barely walk by the time the national title game is played because of the grind of having to play MI, the Big Ten Championship and two playoff games.

The obvious answer is to expand the playoffs another week to an eight-team field, but it doesn’t change the bearing the system has had on a team like MI for this year.

They’ll face Washington in one of the two semifinals on January 9 with Clemson taking on Ohio State in the other on the same day.

“To return out here to Arizona, we had a little taste of it past year and it was a quick trip, barely remember it”, Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said.

Barrett had to watch the 2014 playoffs from the sidelines on a scooter, taking the weight off a broken ankle suffered in the fourth quarter of the regular season finale against MI.

And so we evolved to the College Football Playoff, with an expanded format and a 12-member “blue ribbon” panel to play matchmaker. That may be the way it is for awhile – at least until the playoff grows up.

Speaking of Barrett, if Ohio State is to get past Clemson, the QB must play better.

Clemson finished No. 3 in The Associated Press Top 25, a spot behind Ohio State. None of them were ranked any lower than sixth since the selection committee started ranking teams in early November.

The hand-wringing debate involved the intersection of nonconference scheduling, head-to-head outcomes and conference championships, and how to apply appropriate value to each. Between 2010 and 2014, the Big Ten swelled from 11 teams to 14, including the addition of Maryland, following the model other leagues used to expand their reach into more television markets, with the aim of negotiating more lucrative rights deals. We’ll see if that’s right when they meet in the Fiesta Bowl. (The Rose, Sugar and Orange Bowls have previous existing contracts with conferences). Washington’s first game ever against an FCS school came in 2011.

Which only goes to show that even when humans are fully in charge of matchups and don’t share the burden with computers – Bowl Championship Series, anyone? – what makes for the most deserving is a moving target. Both programs are making their second appearance in the College Football Playoff. You have to somehow simulate that game here in the next couple weeks to get them ready to play in that final game. The Florida State Seminoles beat the Auburn Tigers 34-31.

“The Huskies rank fourth nationally in scoring offense, averaging 44.5 points per game”.

Given that the old-style polls came up with the same top four teams in their final regular-season rankings, and any non-partisan panel of educated fans would have done the same, it kind of leaves you wondering what the CFP puts on its expense reports.

The two other semifinalists have experience in the young playoff system. Houston had no problem showing up for the big games on its schedule, so I’d expect them to be geared up for the 2016 season finale. Each would net $100,000 if the Buckeyes win their second national title in the past three years. The ESPN broadcast has the largest audience in cable TV history with 33.3 million viewers.

2019 – Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.