The Championship Week Watch
Who will control the box and who has the talent to attack outside the box and win the National Championship?
The weekly playoff rankings are a pretty big content machine in college football right now.
I generally see debates between people making the case for smaller programs to be included based on resume vs more establishment types countering that the playoffs should select the big, proven programs with better recruiting and big time resources.
There’s not necessarily a shared value system amongst the participants in the debate. Ultimately the selection committee clearly has a value for creating as popular a TV entertainment product as possible, which means that a school like Ohio State or Alabama with its millions of fans will get the benefit of the doubt over a TCU. However, they won’t leave TCU out in the cold if they cannot or else they spoil the sense of any fairness to the system and spoil it.
The ultimate goal of this is to generate money which powers the American University system and the real squabbling is over which communities get to stick their hand in the increasingly big pie…much like every other debate in America.
Recent events in which Luke Fickell took G5 Cincinnati to the playoffs, deployed a gameplan against Alabama geared around keeping it close, then one year later taking a massive pay day to coach at a P5 program getting flushed with TV money suggest this battle can really only end one way.
Rather than give notes on the playoff rankings before they’re final, I’d like to offer something else, what I’m calling “Championship rankings.”
What are those? My own rankings of relevant reams based on what I perceive to be their chances of winning 2-3 postseason games and then hoisting the National Championship trophy, if given the chance. I’m not ranking their chances of being included, but their chances of actually winning the games if they have an opportunity.
Michigan
Georgia
USC
Ohio State
Alabama
TCU
Utah
No one after that really matters. Honestly we could maybe skip ahead to a Georgia-Michigan Final this season and I’m not sure we’d miss much. We’ll dive into my reasoning in the Championship Game previews after the paywall:
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