Trojans, Buckeyes circle the one empty chair

The next-to-last College Football Playoff poll happens Tuesday night, and USC should edge Ohio State for the No. 4 slot.

Imagine, for one second, that we’re already in a 12-team college football playoff world.

The Pac-12 championship game Friday night would only mean something to Utah, not USC. The Trojans, ranked fourth in last week’s CFP poll, would be safely in.

Same with the Big 10 championship. Michigan would be high and dry.

Last week’s Michigan-Ohio State game would have sizzled anyway, for the elements of geographical and social contempt that we hold so dear, but there would be no threat of elimination.

For that matter, the Georgia-Tennessee game on Nov. 5, a major winnowing point, wouldn’t have seriously endangered either club. Tennessee is still No. 7 in the AP poll despite its loss in that game and another to South Carolina.

When the 12-team playoff arrives, it brings a cart full of baggage. Eventually the top clubs will be tempted to hold out their most valuable players, for a playoff grind of three or four extra games.

College players would decide to sit out with “discomfort,” a dreaded plague that idles several NBA supermax players each day of the week.

So enjoy what we have while we have it. The power of college football lies in the unforgiving nature of the four-team bracket, the grinding, 12-hour Saturdays in which every game is non-refundable, and no tickets are printed, let alone scanned, until four candidates are identified.

Just as the Best Picture award meant more when there were five and not ten nominees, there’s an honor to getting this far. For a few years more, college football still has the last, best regular season.

And it always comes down to something like this: Two teams, one musical chair.

Unless it suffers a Cumberland-to-Georgia Tech style catastrophe at the hands of LSU, Georgia is in. Michigan might be just as safe against Purdue, but it’s not smart to give the selection committee a reason to mark you down. TCU needs to beat Kansas State, too.

But right now the true competition is for the No. 4 chair. It’s USC (11-1) vs. Ohio State (11-1), slowly circling.

Ohio State has one advantage, even after Michigan strafed the Buckeyes 45-23 in Columbus Saturday. It isn’t playing.

USC is, against Utah, the team that sullied the Trojans’ record with Cameron Rising’s two-point run in a 43-42 victory in Salt Lake City. In that Oct. 15 game Caleb Williams threw five touchdown passes for USC, and the two teams finished six yards apart.

The 12-person committee is wide-ranging, although there are seven athletic directors. Anytime you get seven athletic directors doing anything, it’s too many.

Mitch Barnhart (Kentucky), Tom Burman (Wyoming), chairman Boo Corrigan (North Carolina State), Warde Manuel (Michigan), and Gene Taylor (Kansas State) are five of those seven.

Joe Taylor is an AD who has actually coached. He won four Black national championships at Hampton.

Rick George is an AD with a totally clean slate, rarely exposed to football. He’s at Colorado.

There are two former NFL players, John Urschel and Hall of Famer Will Shields. There is former sportswriter Kelly Whiteside. There is Jim Grobe, longtime coach, most prominently at Wake Forest. And there is businessman Rod West.

With such diversity of background, it’s unclear if the committee has a predetermined policy. If it doesn’t, that’s a good thing. But generally there’s a camp that looks at body of work, and there’s another that uses the eye test, which is difficult because eyes are never tested for objectivity.

Recency bias is also a pitfall. We are told that, under this system, every game counts. That means August and November games alike. Then again, you want playoff teams who are coming in hot.

If Ohio State and USC had played each other, or if they had played similar schedules, this wouldn’t be so complicated.

Instead, the committee has to decide whether to judge each team by its best day or its worst, and by how much it was tested in between.

Each team played Notre Dame. Ohio State won 21-10 in the opener. USC won 38-27 on Saturday. Ohio State beat Toledo (7-5) and Arkansas State (3-9) otherwise, and USC beat Rice (5-7) and Fresno State (8-4, and in the Mountain West championship game).

The conference records are trickier. There are six Pac-12 teams in the AP Top 25 and only three Big 10 teams. Yet USC has not beaten anyone as good as Penn State (10-2), which Ohio State defeated 44-31. Oregon and Washington were not on the Trojans’ dance card.

Then again, USC faced down its rival and outpointed UCLA, 45-42. Ohio State’s rival came to town and was measuring its offense in furlongs instead of yards by the end of the 45-23 afternoon.

Oregon State wasn’t ranked in September, but turned out to be a rugged 9-3 team that led USC until the dying moments. That 17-14 victory was an early road test that the Trojans passed, an overlooked catalyst in their saga. Had the Buckeyes gotten more difficult wins in the top-heavy Big Ten, they might not have dissipated when an opponent finally barked back.

So when the music stops, Caleb Williams should be pulling the chair just as Marvin Harrison Jr. is completing his sitting motion. USC deserves to be the fourth finalist, with one weekend of delicious discomfort awaiting.