Central Florida Mess Highlights Absurdity of FBS Football Champs

Central Florida has declared themselves the national champions of college football for 2017. They are throwing a parade. They are paying their coaches the bonuses in their contracts they were supposed to get if they won it all. After going 13-0 and beating Auburn in the Sugar Bowl, they are all in.

Of course we are! That’s what National Championship programs do. Our coaches were informed of that earlier this week. #ChargeOn https://t.co/1iIoVfAnb7

— Danny White (@UCFDannyWhite) January 3, 2018

This has infuriated some and invoked a straightening of the tie, a chuckle and a smirk from others (like Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby — we’ll get to him). But I kind of love it. The question is not, why is UCF doing this, but rather, why wouldn’t anyone who went undefeated in a given sport do something similar?

3rd-best SEC team is gonna play another SEC team for a national title on same field where UCF clinched 13-0 season by beating 2nd-best SEC team (who beat those other 2 SEC teams). Thank God the 4-team playoff has brought undisputed clarity to what used to be a complicated mess!

— Mark Titus (@clubtrillion) January 2, 2018

And this sort of highlights the absurdity of it all. College football is in many ways the greatest sport. In other ways, it is the most absurd. Maybe this is part of what makes it the greatest. After Oklahoma State’s exclusion from the 2011 title game, the CFB Playoff era was ushered in. It has been great, if only an exercise in more of the absurdity we saw in the pre-CFP era.

But what has come to light as the mouth of door into postseason immortality is that there is a sector of FBS teams — like, half of them — that have no chance to play for the national championship. We knew this before, but you could at least rationalize it away because there were almost always two teams that had better than or similar records to the best non-Power 5 team. Now with double the teams playing for the title? It’s not so clear.

I’m glad for it, too. I think it’s the dumbest thing in sports that the coach at North Texas or Memphis or Colorado State can show up in August for the start of team camp and has to tell his team, “fellas, if we win every game we play — all 12 or 13 or 14 of them — there’s a zero percent chance we are going to walk away as the best team in the country.”

That’s lunacy.

So one of two things needs to happen that should have happened a long time ago. Either move the playoff to eight (I’m pretty meh on this) or move all the non-Power 5 teams to a different league altogether. Make it the FBS-1 or something and let them play for a FBS-1 title.

Aside: This would never happen, but how cool would it be if there was a FBS-1 final four and those four teams all got to slide into the places for the four worst FBS teams (i.e. Kansas, Oregon State, Indiana etc.) a la the EPL? That would be incredible.

But Bowlsby. He harrumphed at the idea that UCF is calling itself the champ because that’s something they could never achieve if they played in a Big Daddy™ conference.

“(The playoff is) fair (to UCF) because playing in the American Athletic is not the same as playing in the Big Ten or the SEC or the Big 12, it’s just not,” Bowlsby told ESPN.

“They have some big games, but they don’t have an Iowa State who can beat a second-ranked Oklahoma. The depth of those leagues and the quality at the top, getting ready for one game against Auburn, that’s a lot different than playing Auburn every week. … TCU, if TCU and UCF played 10 times, I defy anybody to convince me that UCF would win the majority of the games. Of course I’ve only been looking at it for 35 years.”

Fine, whatever. I agree with him about UCF and TCU. But let’s re-democratize the system if this is the case. In what sport should you ever be able to say, we won ’em all but we weren’t quite good enough. That’s insane! But it’s become par for the course in college football.

Also, Scott Frost will crush at Nebraska.