It was champagne football, but in 2024 the bubble bursts

TCU, Michigan, Ohio State and Georgia showed us the power of the 4-team playoff.

Dee Winters

The four-team College Football Playoff is our friend. It was there for us on Saturday. It rooted us to our sofas, kept us from watching Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen, dissuaded us from denuding the Christmas tree.

True, it may have fattened us some, because nothing does more for an appetite than four football teams who drive erratically on New Year’s Eve, but that only fuels our 2023 resolutions. Unfortunately, there is no such resolve among college football administrators, who will bring eight guets to the playoff beginning in 2024. Nothing’s worse than attending a party when you don’t belong.

To review, Georgia stormed to a 42-41 win over Ohio State. It trailed 38-24 going into the fourth quarter, went ahead 41-38 with 0:54 left, and peered through its fingers as Ohio State’s Noah Ruggles jerked a 50-yard field goal attempt at the end. Of course, that’s not much of a summary of that Peach Bowl semifinal. It’s like saying Butch and Sundance robbed trains and then hit the road. There was a little more to it than that.

The fact that Georgia and Ohio State had such energy indicates they had not hyperventilated their way through Saturday’s lidlifter between Michigan and TCU. The Horned Frogs led by scores of 21-3 and 41-22 and still had to sweat out one final Michigan bid and one more daft replay decision. As Michigan tight end Colston Loveland was being dragged down, he also got helmet-butted by TCU’s Kee’yon Stewart. Somehow the officials decided the hit was legal. If it was, they should toss out all targeting language from the rule book and turn back the clock to the days before CTE was a thing.

A 15-yard penalty would have moved the ball to the vicinity of Michigan’s 40 yard line for the final play. Long odds to be sure, but J.J. McCarthy had already proven that no end zone was beyond his reach. But that’s where it ended, and TCU will play Georgia for the national championship in SoFi Stadium on Jan. 9.

The whole show ended right about midnight in the East, and America took one final champagne swig with the certainty that it had just watched the best four teams in the game. They had lost two games among them, and only one to a team outside the CFP, and that was TCU’s overtime loss to Kansas State in the Big 12 championship.

Kansas State lost the Sugar Bowl, 45-20 to Alabama on Saturday, and Nick Saban said this strengthened his case for admission to the CFP. Certainly Bryce Young was brilliant in his farewell to unregulated pro football. But Alabama had lost two games during the regular season, both on the final play at Tennessee and LSU to be sure, but losses nevertheless. If the CFP committee had included Alabama instead of Ohio State or TCU, it would have tossed the regular season overboard, tacitly admitting that results don’t matter, and opinions supersede truth. Fortunately it stuck to the script. TCU could have used such adherence in 2014.

That was the year of the first CFP. TCU had lost once, a 3-pointer to Baylor. Ohio State had also lost once, to Virginia Tech in its opener. Baylor was far better than Virginia Tech, and the Horned Frogs had won their last two games by a total of 103-13. But the velvet rope came down for Ohio State and not for TCU. The fact that the Buckeyes went ahead and won the championship did not justify this mistake. The Horned Frogs grimly went to the Peach Bowl that year and tortured Ole Miss, 42-3. That felt good, but not as good as beating Michigan, which has now lost six consecutive bowl games and took too long getting emotionally involved in this one.

The pregame assumption was that Michigan, with its award-winning line, would squash TCU like a grape. Instead the Horned Frogs outrushed the Big Ten champs 263-186, or 273-233 if you delete sack yardage, and had 12 rushing first downs to Michigan’s seven. The Wolverines couldn’t find or avoid linebacker Dee Winters, and couldn’t consistently budge nose tackle Damonic Johnson, an 18-year-old, 320-pounder who was playing for Alemany High in southern California last year. Michigan’s Donovan Edwards spurted 54 yards on the first snap of the game and, thereafter, gained only 73 on 22 carries.

The most dangerous Michigan runner turned out to be McCarthy, who had a 39-yard run among his 10 carries. His arm was lethal, too. But with all this epicurean offense, TCU probably won the game on two interceptions for touchdowns, by Winters and Bud Clark. And, again, the Horned Frogs never changed expression when they absorbed Michigan’s body shots.

People may not grasp what’s going on here. TCU was 28-24 the past four years and 5-7 in 2021. It fired Gary Patterson, who had given the Frogs a survivor’s mentality and had found success by prioritizing speed, followed by speed, augmented by more speed, in the recruiting wars. TCU had two memorable Alamo Bowl wins, coming back from 0-31 to beat Oregon 47-41, and coming back from 3-21 to beat Stanford 39-37. It also won a Rose Bowl over Wisconsin and J.J. Watt.

But, not so long ago, the Frogs were forced into conference-hopping, from the WAC to Conference USA to the MAC. It’s still Texas Christian University, a small but wealthy school by the Trinity River in Fort Worth, the favorite rooting interest of the late author Dan Jenkins. Recently it’s become chic among West Coast students, to the point that TCU advertises in LAX terminals and is known parenthetically as Texas California University. But in football, its roots are in the small Texas towns where the Friday Night Lights burn seriously.

No CFP participant has been so unexpected. In the opener, TCU trailed woebegone Colorado, 7-6, before Max Duggan took over as the quarterback. Sonny Dykes is the first-year coach, the same guy that Cal fired, supposedly because he seemed too curious about other jobs,  If that’s true, his wanderlust was justified.

TCU immediately opened as a 13-point underdog to Georgia, but don’t go to the bank with that. Ohio State proved that, no, Georgia can’t lose five first-round draft choices off the 2021 defense without consequences. C.J. Stroud riddled the Bulldogs from the beginning, especially by running, and it’s doubtful Georgia would have survived had Javon Bullard not knocked out Marvin Harrison Jr. in the end zone. Bullard blasted Harrison in the head, but an original targeting call was reversed. It happened in the third quarter, and Harrison went into concussion protocol and did not return. He had already gained 106 yards on five catches.

Georgia was trailing 38-27 when Ohio State coach Ryan Day, caffeine coursing through his veins the entire evening, passed up a fourth-and-one and punted. Stetson Bennett IV, the walk-on and junior college transfer who became a Heisman finalist, then triggered two touchdown drives. The first was simple, a 76-yarder to Arian Smith when a cornerback slipped. The other ended with a touchdown pass to Adonai Mitchell, but the key was Bennett’s 35-yard bullet to Kearis Jackson that set up Georgia on the Buckeyes’ 15.

Stroud got the ball on his own 25 with 0:54 left and was on Georgia’s 31 in 30 seconds’ time, thanks to his serpentine 27-yard run. Down 42-41, his game was to set up Ruggles. Day called a running play that lost a yard, which inflamed Twitter, but he also called passes on the next two plays. One was broken up and the other was scotched by Georgia’s pass rush, forcing a throwaway.

Ruggles had hit two 49-yarders during the season and a 48-yarder on this night. His try squirted left, offering no hope, and Bennett broke into tears as he ran around randomly.

“They were beating us the whole game,” Bennett said, and indeed the Buckeyes were. Having beaten Alabama in last year’s championship game, he knew from experience that time can be stretched and mistakes can be erased, at least on the gridiron.

A sizeable mistake looms over the Playoff, and we’ll sing about it mournfully during the hail of mismatches that a 12-team bracket promises. For now, Saturday was our cup of kindness.