More than a century after the first Rose Bowl, college football continues to dazzle with its bowl games, confounding those who have prematurely written their obituaries in an era of a 12-team playoff. In game after game, this season’s bowl games provided thrilling contests decided in the final moments, while the non-bowl playoff games (excluding the national championship game, which essentially functions like a neutral-site bowl game) produced four snoozers. The lesson in this, as in much else, is that organic, locally generated, time-tested notions are almost always superior to schemes designed by central planners who wish to replace the old with the new while lacking the understanding of why venerable traditions are beloved.
Coming into this college football postseason, capped by last night’s win by Ohio State over Notre Dame to win the national championship, all of the attention was on the new thing: playoff games played on campuses, in four teams’ home stadiums. The bowl games were treated as an afterthought, a relic. Then these four non-bowl playoff games held on campuses produced margins of victory of 10, 28, 14, and 25 points—an average of 19.3 points—with the home team winning in each case. That doesn’t even fully capture how lacking in drama these games were; the halftime margins were 14, 28, 18, and 11 points, respectively—18 points on average.
Then the bowl games began—played at neutral sites, mostly in good weather—and football drama broke out. Not counting the national championship game—which although played at the Peach Bowl site, isn’t officially a bowl game—there were 41 bowl games (6 playoff bowls, 35 regular bowls) involving football bowl subdivision teams. Twenty-one of them—a majority—were decided by just one score (8 points or less). More than a third (14 of 41) were decided by 3 points or less, in overtime, or on a touchdown in the game’s final two minutes.
The bowl games that doubled as playoff games were far better than the non-bowl playoff games played on campuses. Notre Dame kicked a game-winning field goal with 7 seconds left to beat Penn State in the Orange Bowl. Texas, down only 7 points, had the ball at the Ohio State 1-yard line with just over 3 minutes left in the Cotton Bowl, but couldn’t punch it in. Ten days earlier, the Peach Bowl featured an instant classic between Texas and Arizona State, in which the Longhorns prevailed in double-overtime. Only the Rose Bowl lacked any second-half drama, as Ohio State crushed Oregon—but its setting was still the best in American sports.
It turns out that those who have brought us the bowl games across the decades—games played in front of roughly equal numbers of both teams’ fans in generally attractive places—knew what they were doing. Such circumstances tend to lead to evenly matched contests. It’s a small sample size, but the early results suggest that having better teams host worse teams in playoff games doesn’t promote similar drama.
Not everyone, however, is convinced of the bowl games’ merits. The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay writes that “this tournament remains too obedient to the bowls.” He thinks it “seems unfair” that the playoff’s top four seeds—those who got first-round byes—had to play second-round games at neutral sites rather than getting a “home game carrot.” Never mind that the NCAA basketball tournament stages all of its games at neutral sites. Gay also thinks it is “kind of weird”—“inexplicable,” even—to have a playoff game in the Rose Bowl, after which “Ohio State players [were] walking around with Rose Bowl Champions hats despite having possibly two more games left to play.” Thankfully, the Buckeyes’ players rightfully value a Rose Bowl victory far more than Gay does.
According to Gay, teams with first-round byes got rusty during their long layoffs and were actually at a disadvantage versus teams who had played in the first round, citing as evidence that the teams with byes collectively lost all four of their games. It’s not at all clear, however, that rust was the culprit. The teams with byes were underdogs in three of the four games, according to Las Vegas. Arizona State, a nearly two-touchdown underdog, was within one play of beating Texas—meaning the well-rested team made the game a lot closer than expected. Georgia, a slim favorite over Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl, seemed more affected by the loss of its starting quarterback than many anticipated, scoring only 10 points, but the Bulldogs’ defense didn’t look rusty at all.
Meanwhile, slight-favorite Ohio State’s blowout of Oregon probably had little to do with rust and a lot to do with the way high-profile rematch games often go in college football. When one team loses in a close battle during the regular season, especially if the loser seems to be the more talented team, a rematch can prove ugly—for the first game’s winner. Football is a sport where motivation is crucial, and the motivational advantage usually lies with the team that felt the sting of defeat the first time. Readers might recall LSU’s classic 9-6 overtime win at Alabama in 2011, which was followed by the Crimson Tide’s crushing the Tigers 21-0 in the national championship game (while holding them to just 92 total yards), or Florida State’s 3-point win over Florida 1996, which was followed by the Gators’ routing of the Seminoles, 52-20, in the 1997 Sugar Bowl.
To his credit, Gay doesn’t want the playoffs to expand further—“Do not expand this tournament” to 16 teams, he writes—to eliminate the byes. And with good reason: doing so this season would have resulted in adding four teams that collectively won only one bowl game and lost three, despite playing non-elite teams. Alabama lost to Michigan (unranked by the playoff committee; ranked #19 in the Anderson & Hester Rankings, which I co-created with Chris Hester and which were part of the Bowl Championship Series across its 16-year run). South Carolina lost to #20 (per the committee, #18 in Anderson & Hester) Illinois. Miami lost to #18 (#16 in Anderson & Hester) Iowa State. Only Ole Miss won—but they did so versus a non-top-25 Duke team that was missing its starting quarterback and tailback.
As Gay rightly observes, it would make more sense to reduce the playoff field to eight teams than to expand it further, but that’s unlikely to happen. Playoffs, like government bureaucracies, almost never shrink in size.
Gay’s other complaint is that the playoff byes are reserved for conference champions. But it would seem strange to have a conference runner-up get a bye over the champion of that same conference merely because the committee ranked the former #4 and the latter #5. Conference championships should mean something, and their objective quality (no one doubts which team won the conference title) provides a welcome relief from the committee’s subjectivity.
The good news for college football fans is that despite the massive changes in the sport this year, the bowl games continue to shine. Going into this postseason, nobody could have expected that myriad “lesser” (non-playoff) bowl games would produce far more interesting games than the first-round playoff matchups did, or that almost all of the best playoff games would be bowl games. But that’s exactly what has happened.
College football’s powers-that-be should value the bowls more, not less. They should make sure that the Rose Bowl will get to keep its traditional 2:00 P.M. PST starting time on New Year’s Day—a guarantee that playoff officials have so far withheld. That time allows the sunset in Arroyo Seco Canyon to coincide with roughly the end of the third quarter in the “Granddaddy of Them All.” Observers can then contemplate the gradual transition from sunny blue skies to bright stadium lights producing the best naturally dramatic setting in all of sports.
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