Amid sweeping changes to college football, Michigan over Ohio State still mattered
A look at Michigan's remarkable turnaround and what the 12-team playoff means for college football
My last post here wasn’t that long ago, just 15 days ago to be exact. At the time, the Michigan football team was 5-5. Since, the Wolverines:
Unlike the past three years, Michigan won’t be playing in this Saturday’s Big Ten championship or the national playoff. But I guarantee there’s not a happier 7-5 team in the country.
Sticking with college football, as the sport enters conference championship weekend, it’s worth considering the value (and future) of such games. Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger did just that.
“How can it be a detriment for someone to play in a conference championship game?” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told Yahoo. “If you want to kill the conference championship games, have somebody who is within the top 12 play for a championship and have them fall out and be leapfrogged.”
A conference championship is meaningful (especially, apparently, in the SEC). But the system is broken when a team (say, SMU) can be hurt by a conference championship appearance at the expense of a team (say, Alabama) that isn’t even playing.
I’ve wondered what the playoff, which expands to 12 teams this year, will do to the rest of the bowl games. (My opinion on that, to paraphrase Ivan Drago: If they die, they die.) It’s worth thinking about the conference title games too.
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I hear from many college sports fans, some of whom subscribe to this site, who say they are fed up with the direction college sports are heading. I get it. But I think many of them also share the opinion Rodger Sherman entertainingly hammers home in a post titled “They can’t make college football suck.”
From conference realignment to NIL, the sport is changing. Sherman writes that Ohio State’s season should have been completely ruined by the loss to Michigan. Instead, the expanded playoff means the Buckeyes can still win the national championship. Even so, the game itself (and the immediate aftermath) were incredible. He makes similar points about Texas-Texas A&M (a rivalry that unnecessarily took a 13-year hiatus).
“They’re gonna try to strip college football and rebuild it to make as much money as possible,” Sherman writes. “But when the demo crews get all the way down to the foundation, they’re going to find the load-bearing love and hate that college football was built on. It’s strong enough to ensure that rivalry games which don’t matter still matter, and strong enough to bring special matchups that died back to life.”
Another interesting story: SI.com’s Chris Mannix on why ESPN’s NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski left his gig to become the general manager for the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team.
And another one: My Advance Local colleague Brian Fonseca talked to the right people, attended the right events, and wrote a very detailed story on how two star freshmen are bringing their basketball talents (and their brands) to Rutgers