What if there'd been a playoff in 2010?
This could have been one of the all-time opportunities for a non-blue blood to win a National Championship in the modern era...
If you missed it, I did a long breakdown of the 2008 National Championship race and theorized on what might have happened if college football had been using the current four-team playoff format.
What if there'd been a four-team playoff in 2008?
I was a student at the University of Texas in 2008 and can remember that season as vividly as any other in college football history. The Longhorns came within a few big plays in Lubbock of finishing the season undefeated and proceeding to the National Championship where they would have faced off against Florida.
After a lot of historical analysis I settled on…the real life 2008 champion Florida Gators team. Pretty boring, my apologies.
What made 2008 so wild is how many really good teams we had that season amongst the traditional blue blood programs. Alabama was coming alive under Nick Saban and undefeated before the SEC Championship, Texas and Oklahoma each had some of their best teams of the decade, and USC was still marauding the nation under Pete Carroll. Florida was great, but there were other teams you could pit against them in that format with realistic chances.
The 2010 season was VERY different. Here were the final BCS rankings before the bowl season:
The only one of those schools with a claimed National Championship since 1940 is the Auburn Tigers and their title had come back in 1957.
A considerable amount of what is discussed today in terms of blue bloods, blue chip ratio, and which teams have National Championship resources would be a different conversation if either Oregon won OR there’d been a playoff format which had allowed TCU or Stanford to take home the crown.
So, if there had been a four-team playoff, who’d have won???