Lots of people are cursing the College Football Playoff Committee, ESPN, Kirk Herbstreet, and whoever else has any responsibility for how the playoffs were fumbled, pardon the pun, this year. The top 4 teams, actually I should say it this way– the 4 teams invited to the playoffs are Michigan, Washington, Texas, and Alabama. I won’t ask how a team ranked 8th somehow propelled up to #4 and the #4 team which won their conference championship and is 1 of 3 undefeated teams in the top 10 dropped to #5 because the answer is undefinable.
There is plenty of unfairness in football. Even on a play by play basis, referees miss calls or make bad calls, players get away with skirting the rules, coaches too (*ahem* Michigan), but it’s just a real shame when the dollar holds more power than fairness. Some call snubbing FSU and UGA a mistake but that word– mistake– implies it was almost accidental. This exclusion was a conscious choice and makes it something way beyond a mistake… it’s practically sinister.
The anger felt by a lot of people is the same way, almost exactly, that I felt when FSU blindsided loyal fans with a venture co-managed by Nike, changing the decades-old logo because that’s what Nike wanted. Was it coincidence that this happened at the height of FSU’s relevance and popularity in the mid-2010s, right after winning the national championship? A new logo meant fans spending oodles and oodles of money but why didn’t they change the logo when FSU’s football team only had 7 wins and 4 losses? What a weird coincidence that the team was coming off a national championship and this huge change happened. The university’s and Nike’s greed was exposed and I haven’t forgiven them for it. Is it another weird coincidence that FSU is having a historic season and now the stadium is about to get an overhaul with the seating, and prices have gone up thousands for season ticket holders?
Obviously I’m still hurt and ticked off. But it has nothing to the guys on the football team this year. I hate that their season is ending in controversy because in the simplest terms: it’s not fair. Maybe it’s a great life lesson but they have the rest of their lives to learn lessons like that. For this moment, what they earned and deserved was stolen and given to a team that didn’t deserve or earn it.
They did everything they could do to make it to the college football playoffs but came up a bit short… by… winning all their games and winning their conference championship. If only they could’ve… won all their games and won their conference champ– wait, this is bizarre. Controversy aside, going 13-0 is so much better than where they were just a few years ago. Remember the “turnover backpack”?
For new FSU fans or anyone just getting into college sports, this backpack was a real thing. If it’s possible to somehow make it less embarrassing, many teams had some sort of gimmick that (I think) started with the University of Miami having a “turnover chain.”
The turnover backpack is one of the worst things FSU has contributed to college football. But now the committee has done something even more embarrassing which will hurt college football for years, possibly decades. But the silver lining is that at least there hasn’t been a turnover backpack seen on the FSU sideline in years.
-Out of the Wilderness
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