College Football Playoff committee can't miss the one thing Indiana does better than some SEC foes
Going into the 2024 season, there was a ton of excitement surrounding the debut of the 12-team College Football Playoff. No more would there be teams with one loss left out because of the constraints of having four teams, as they would get an opportunity to make the dance. Plus, there would be a guarantee […]
Going into the 2024 season, there was a ton of excitement surrounding the debut of the 12-team College Football Playoff.
No more would there be teams with one loss left out because of the constraints of having four teams, as they would get an opportunity to make the dance. Plus, there would be a guarantee of at least one team from the group of five with a chance to become Cinderella.
The idea of the 12-team playoff is a good one, but it's brought out the worst in college football media.
Wins still matter in College Football
Let's take a journey back to 1997.
There were two dominant teams in the 1997 season: the Michigan Wolverines and Nebraska Cornhuskers. Both teams went undefeated in the regular season with Nebraska beating Tennesse in the Orange Bowl and Michigan beating Washington State in the Rose Bowl.
Oddly enough, the losers of those bowl games saw their starting quarterbacks go first (Peyton Manning) and second (Ryan Leaf) overall in April's NFL Draft. Those teams never got to play each other for the National Championship and ended up split with Nebraska winning the USA Coaches Poll and Michigan winning the AP Poll.
That was the last season that saw the National Championship be decided without having a game between the "top two" teams with the Bowl Championship Series being implemented the next season.
Before and during the BCS that everybody loved to hate, which then became the genesis of the original four-team College Football Playoff, wins were the most important thing. You needed to have a good resume, as the Mountain West winner wasn't going to rank high in the BCS. Undefeated Utah in 2004 and Boise State in 2006 finished in the top 10 of the BCS but weren't in a position to make the National Championship Game.
This year, the latest example of a team that is undefeated and isn't getting the respect they deserve is the Indiana Hoosiers. Unlike the teams listed above, they are in one of the best conferences in the Big Ten, but their resume isn't that of a "great Big Ten team."
This week, there was a full-court press trying to discredit Indiana as a team worthy of a playoff spot and that two-loss SEC teams
It felt like they got the call from SEC public relations people at the same time to try and discredit the Hoosiers' case to make it. And yes, their resume isn't great but we can't blame them either.
The only thing we can blame Indiana for is their non-conference schedule where they played Western Illinois, Florida International and Charlotte. An FCS team and two bad FBS teams isn't a good non-conference schedule.
However, the argument that all the talking heads keep making is their poor in conference schedule. They did beat last year's National Championship Game participants in Michigan and Washington but both teams have taken a massive step back. Outside of them, they don't have to play:
- Penn State
- Oregon
- Wisconsin
- Iowa
- Minnesota
They did whip Nebraska 56-7 when Nebraska was 5-1 on the season which was viewed as a good win at the time and they do get a chance to beat Ohio State on Saturday afternoon.
Even so, Indiana had no say in their non-conference schedule in arguably the best, at worst second-best, conference in the country. Are we not going to punish Texas for having their biggest wins being Vanderbilt and Michigan? That's about the same as Indiana and the Hoosiers didn't get blown out at home by Georgia in a game the Longhorns weren't competitive.
Why isn't Texas getting the same treatment as Indiana? Because the Longhorns have a storied college football history and made the College Football Playoff last season and have won a National Championship in the last 20 years.
What has Indiana done? Had upsets of Michigan and Penn State in 2020 and Antwaan Randle-El finished sixth in the 2001 Heisman Trophy voting. It's been a bunch of nothing outside of that. There isn't a history of success with the football program, nor is the any kind of national cache attachment to the Hoosiers football program like so many other teams have.
The bottom line is this: winning matters. It's not Indiana's fault they were handed an "easy" Big Ten schedule. It's still incredibly difficult to win your games. The Hoosiers had just a 5.6% chance to start the season 10-0.
Wins have always mattered much more than losses when it comes to determining who the best teams are in College Football. Just 15 years ago, one loss could have eliminated you from even competing for a National Championship. However, with the advent of the 12-team College Football Playoff, we are supposed to praise teams like Ole Miss and Tennessee for having two "quality" losses?
Wins have always mattered and they shouldn't have ever stopped. This pro-loss propaganda is incredibly frustrating and is against the heart of college football. NBC Sports' Nicole Auerbach wrote some brilliant words on the subject earlier this week.
What teams have done on the field should matter. I am sick and tired of the idea that Indiana would be near the bottom of the SEC standings if it played in that conference. I am sick and tired of the idea that the SEC’s two-loss merry-go-round of teams are inherently better than the Hoosiers (or Penn State or Miami or anyone else for that matter) simply because they’d be favored against them in a hypothetical matchup. If we went by Vegas odds, there would never be any need to actually play any games. Alabama was favored over Vanderbilt by 22.5 points, so that’s all we need to know, right?
The beauty of the 12-team College Football Playoff is supposed to be that we can determine a national champion on the field. In certain seasons over the past decade, there was a chance that the nation’s best team was not among the top four seeds. It’s far less likely that we’ll have a bracket with five conference champions and seven at-large teams that leaves out someone who might actually be the best team in the country that particular season.
The games matter. They have always mattered and always will matter. Whether the sportsbooks have Indiana as the underdog in every game against a potential SEC opponent, the fact is this.
Indiana has earned the right to play in the College Football Playoff. Just like Hawaii in 2007 earned the right to play in the Sugar Bowl, Cincinnati in the semifinals in 2021 and TCU in the National Championship Game in 2022. They earned the right to either be embarrassed or prove they belong.
College sports are about the moments like Boise State upsetting Oklahoma. You get them from winning football games. Indiana has earned it by winning football games, maybe the two-loss SEC teams should have done what they did.
