Stop worrying about lopsided College Football Playoff games

No, the 12-team playoff isn't flawed because of a lack of close contests. College football's biggest events have always been like this

In some ways, the expansion of the College Football Playoff from four to 12 teams was supposed to eliminate debate.

Unlike the four-team field, which showed in its last year of existence that it could exclude an undefeated major-conference team, the 12-team playoff would theoretically include any team that had a realistic shot at a national championship or, at the very least, a credible argument to make it to that point. If you didn’t make the cut? Tough shit. Few, if any, people will feel sorry over the fact the No. 13 team in the country won’t get the chance to compete for a title.

As we’ve seen this year, and as we should have realized long ago, this was a hopelessly naive train of thought. Sports talk is built around arguments, something that’s truer in college football than any other major American sport. Hell, in men’s college basketball, we spend multiple days every March hearing about how it was a tragedy or some profound disgrace that the 69th and 70th teams got left out of a 68-team tournament.

What’s been interesting, though, is that the debate has continued this year even once playoff games began. And it has taken on a certain, unmistakable tone.

In the final minutes of the first playoff game – Notre Dame’s largely lopsided 27-17 victory against Indiana – Sean McDonough, ESPN’s typically excellent play-by-play man, used the opportunity to question whether the Hoosiers, an 11-1 team from one of the sport’s best conferences, were truly worthy of being included in the field.

On ESPN’s “College GameDay” the following morning, Kirk Herbstreit, as close of a thing as there is to a go-to voice in the sport, took it a step further, saying Indiana was “outclassed” and was “not a team that should’ve been on that field when you consider other teams that could’ve been there,” ostensibly referring to the group of teams just left out of the playoff – Alabama, Ole Miss, South Carolina and Miami.

When SMU lost 38-10 later that day to Penn State, much of that ire shifted to the Mustangs, who claimed the final at-large spot in the field and were maybe an easier punching bag than even lowly Indiana considering SMU was an AAC school this time seven months ago. Lane Kiffin, showing a remarkable lack of self-awareness for someone whose three-loss Ole Miss team handed Kentucky its only SEC win of the season, repeatedly showed his ass.

In each of those instances and countless others, the central point was unmistakable – these teams were illegitimately handed golden tickets to the sport’s premier event over some of college football’s biggest, most well-resourced brands, with their early exits and large margins of defeat proving as much.

The problem, however, is that all of this chatter relies on a faulty assumption. The games at the end of a college football season that crown a champion are rarely close or particularly compelling, making these early rounds of the 12-team playoff a continuation of a norm rather than some precedent-breaking development.

The BCS regularly gave us dud title games

Beginning in the 1998 season, college football introduced a novel idea. Rather than the top teams being spread across various bowl games and having pollsters determine the national champion based on that specious evidence, there would be an honest-to-god national championship game pitting the two highest-ranked teams against one another.

With that, the eventually much-maligned Bowl Championship Series system was born.