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Why Ohio State or Notre Dame will be most deserving college football national champion ever
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- Why Ohio State or Notre Dame will be most deserving college football national champion ever
No matter who wins the College Football Playoff championship game Monday night, be prepared for detractors to offer the following data points:
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"But they lost to Northern Illinois!" will be a popular refrain in the case of a Notre Dame win, noting that no national champion had ever suffered as embarrassing a loss.
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Meanwhile, should Ohio State deliver coach Ryan Day's first national title, get ready to hear plenty of moaning and groaning about how it diminishes the regular season that a two-loss team could win the national title after finishing fourth in the Big Ten.
Let's go ahead and offer a simple and straightforward prebuttal for any attempts to diminish the first champion of the 12-team playoff: Stop this nonsense.
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Either Ohio State or Notre Dame will not just be a worthy champion, but one that deserves special recognition for surviving a gauntlet of four high-intensity, physical playoff games — something no team in the history of the sport has faced.
Deserving? You better believe it.
At some point, after this playoff format has ingrained itself into the consciousness and no longer feels like something new, let's hope this conversation disappears forever.
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Every other team sport has managed to crown its champion through a multi-round playoff without arguing about what-ifs or questioning whether the winner really deserved to be there in the first place. It's time for college football fans to get on board and let the sport's previously misguided ethos remain in the past.
For decades and decades, college football stood apart because it valued the veneer of perfection rather than a series of tournament tests that reveal a team's true qualities.
Certainly college football has had plenty of champions who probably would have won in any format whether it was the poll era, the BCS or the four-team CFP. We can probably find some consensus that nobody was beating 2019 LSU or 2001 Miami or 1995 Nebraska because those teams were so much better than everyone else.
But there were also plenty of years, particularly in the poll era and the BCS, when the sport's proclivity toward being run like a beauty pageant may have misidentified the best and most deserving team.
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In 1984, BYU opened the season with a splashy win over Pittsburgh to jump into the rankings, spent the rest of its season beating a bunch of mediocre-to-bad teams in the Western Athletic Conference, got to No. 1 almost by default when everybody else lost games and clinched the national championship by beating 6-6 Michigan in the Holiday Bowl.
That's what the sport used to be.
But even in the BCS era, there were questionable calls.
Who's to say that Auburn wasn't really the best team in 2004 when it swept through the SEC but got squeezed out of the championship game because Southern Cal and Oklahoma were also unbeaten? How do we know Oklahoma State wouldn't have beaten LSU or Alabama in 2011 if it had gotten a shot instead of the BCS settling for an all-SEC rematch?
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Even more frustrating was that the sport's powerbrokers looked at those controversies year after year and instead of admitting that there was a better way to run its postseason, actually argued that a media food fight over identifying the best team was fueling interest in college football.
Just imagine: If we still had the BCS, this year's national championship game would have been Oregon vs. Georgia, and the winner would have been accepted as the season's legitimate champion.
But because we have actually seen games take place on the field, we know those were not the two best teams. Georgia didn't just lose to Notre Dame, it got physically manhandled. And though Oregon edged out Ohio State at home early in the season, the Ducks proved to be out of the Buckeyes ' league when they played on a neutral field with everything on the line.
If you're one of those tradition-oriented fans who believe that Oregon's earlier win over Ohio State and subsequent Big Ten title should have been the last word because that's how it worked for so many years, I get it.
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But it's misguided thinking, rooted in the idea of a championship as reward rather than the culmination of a process that tests every facet of a team.
Think about what Ohio State has had to go through just in the CFP, facing the nation's No. 3 defense (Texas) , the No. 6 defense ( Tennessee ) and an offense that averaged 35 points per game (Oregon).
Notre Dame has faced the No. 2 scoring offense (Indiana), the SEC champion (Georgia) and the No. 7 defense (Penn State).
Do these teams have some flaws? Of course.
No national championship team has ever lost to an opponent as bad as Northern Illinois, which finished 4-4 in the Mid-American Conference. It was a stunning, inexcusable performance by Notre Dame — but also the catalyst to fixing its issues and becoming a group that played with intensity and focus and purpose.
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And it's true that Ohio State, having lost to Michigan for the fourth year in a row, would not have been talked about at all in the BCS or the four-team CFP. They'd simply have been assigned to some bowl game nobody cares about, and it would have been a sad and desultory ending for a team that never lived up to its potential.
But when you watch Ohio State play in this tournament, with two blowout wins over quality opponents and a tough-as-nails win over Texas, that doesn't exactly seem like a great advertisement for the old system.
"We are very grateful. I think everybody in the program is, to be in this situation, for a lot of reasons," Day said. "But I do think the new format has allowed our team to grow and build throughout the season, and as much as losses hurt, they really allow us as coaches and players to take a hard look at the issues and get them addressed, and then it's about the business of getting them fixed as time goes on. I think that's really been the biggest thing I've learned about this format, which I think has been great for our players. I think it's great for college football."
And nobody has to apologize for it.
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The same way the Miami Heat didn't have to apologize for making the NBA Finals two years ago after losing their first game of the play-in tournament and getting another chance to win the eighth seed.
The same way UConn didn't have to apologize for winning the men's basketball championship in 2014 despite finishing third in the American Athletic Conference and starting the NCAA tournament as an afterthought No. 7 seed.
The same way the 2011 New York Giants didn't have to apologize for being a 9-7 regular season team that just so happened to win a Super Bowl and beat one of the greatest New England Patriots teams of all time in the process.
This is how sports work. Get used to it. Take your complaints elsewhere.
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And the idea that it diminishes the college football regular season because the last two teams standing wouldn't have been the ones picked by a committee or pollsters? There's just no evidence of it.
After all, any team that makes the playoff either got there by winning a conference or by being judged as a top-10 team. That's the standard now in the 12-team playoff, and it's not easy to get there.
Alabama couldn't do it despite being given every benefit of the doubt. Ole Miss couldn't do it despite having perhaps the best overall roster in the SEC. Miami couldn't do it despite having the best offense in college football and going 10-2 in a power conference. If the regular season was meaningless, there wouldn't have been so much crying from that trio about barely missing the cut.
To win a national championship now in college football, you have to be one of the best teams in the country during the regular season and play your best football in December and stay healthy enough to win four postseason games and face teams with a variety of styles and strengths.
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There are no free rides. You have to be complete.
Ohio State and Notre Dame have done that better than anyone, and the winner Monday night will be the most deserving national champion the sport has ever had.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Dan Wolken on social media @DanWolken
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Ohio State or Notre Dame will be deserving college football champion
