College Football / Jason Gay / Wall Street Journal

What will also be funny is that if somehow FSU beats Georgia, the Bama fans will cry…… “but the game didn’t mean that much to Georgia”. Boo hoo hoo.
 
Ohio State Oklahoma and JMU are other schools who's starting QB's have entered the Portal prior to their upcoming Bowl games and will be starting back-ups.
And step two will be second semester transfers playing being eligible for the CFP.
 
I am, by nature, cynical as all f**k, so I get a great kick out of the application of logic to things like selecting teams for the college playoffs. Sorry, but there is no logic, no desire for fairness, no empathy towards, say the FSU players, etc. There is manipulation based on money and power and that is all.
I can almost guarantee there was more discussion within the committee on how to reduce the argument to Alabama / FSU ultimately solved by ranking FSU ahead of Georgia. In what universe does anyone think they are the better team, even with their 1st string QB?
Frankly, does ANYONE think Georgia is not one of the best four teams in the country? So, to my mind, they got screwed by being upset at the worst possible time.
My point being, yes, FSU got screwed, but nobody ever said life is fair, because it isn’t.
 
The playoff system has been disgusting for years. I believe FSU is the 6th team to finish undefeated and not get a chance to compete for the national championship. That shouldn’t be possible IMO and thankfully it won’t be starting next year.

With the crappy system in place, FSU was 5th to me. The ACC title game was one of the worst played games I’ve seen all year. Louisville would have lost by 40 to Alabama or Georgia. The SEC is just too dominant to leave out entirely.

I’d expect Georgia to slap FSU around in a meaningful game, but who knows if it will be that. 5 players passed on the Orange Bowl last year to prepare for the draft and both teams are very disappointed to be left out of the playoff. I can’t imagine Georgia will have any motivation at all coming off two national championships.

Pretty cool that FSU’s best player and projected first round pick played at SUNY Albany first. Albany was in my league when I played at St. John’s and my high school teammate was the starting FB there.
 
College football is and has been a joke for years. Don’t get me wrong. I love the games.

However, any sport that allows a school to basically create its own schedule well…Let’s take the #1 seed Michigan for example. The first 9 (NINE) games were against unranked and frankly BAD teams. I could list them but why bother. This is not an attack on Michigan. They may be the “best” team but c’mon those games were a pathway they created to certain inclusion in the conversation. Oh it’s not just them. Mighty Alabama? Pish posh. Middle Tennessee or Chattanooga anyone? They also survived a below .500 Auburn with a prayer heave to the end zone. ALL teams are doing the same thing.

I could continue but that is what the corrupt system encourages. Keep those dollars flowing boys! A 75M buyout like Jimbo awaits if you don’t schedule properly. At least College Basketball has a format where you have to prove it.

The new football playoff will solve “some” of the problems but fake scheduling cheating and the like will continue forever while all that dough is floating around. By the way, no one else notice how the bowl games are another fraud? Players are in the portal and skipping and signing elsewhere BEFORE the Bowl games are even played. That is not mentioning the NFL bound guys who wisely won’t risk injury. The regular bowl games are meaningless. Just another scam to keep the money coming.
 
College football is and has been a joke for years. Don’t get me wrong. I love the games.

However, any sport that allows a school to basically create its own schedule well…Let’s take the #1 seed Michigan for example. The first 9 (NINE) games were against unranked and frankly BAD teams. I could list them but why bother. This is not an attack on Michigan. They may be the “best” team but c’mon those games were a pathway they created to certain inclusion in the conversation. Oh it’s not just them. Mighty Alabama? Pish posh. Middle Tennessee or Chattanooga anyone? They also survived a below .500 Auburn with a prayer heave to the end zone. ALL teams are doing the same thing.

I could continue but that is what the corrupt system encourages. Keep those dollars flowing boys! A 75M buyout like Jimbo awaits if you don’t schedule properly. At least College Basketball has a format where you have to prove it.

The new football playoff will solve “some” of the problems but fake scheduling cheating and the like will continue forever while all that dough is floating around. By the way, no one else notice how the bowl games are another fraud? Players are in the portal and skipping and signing elsewhere BEFORE the Bowl games are even played. That is not mentioning the NFL bound guys who wisely won’t risk injury. The regular bowl games are meaningless. Just another scam to keep the money coming.
I think college football fans are pathetic until I remember I post 5x a day on a college basketball forum and schedule my whole life around the Mets😂
 
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Jason Gay / Wall Street Journal / January 15, 2024

The Dallas Cowboys are toast, and that is always amusing, but I shall write about the Kansas City Chiefs, because they were in “The Peacock Game.” The Peacock Game! For irritated fans, it immediately enters the Hall of NFL Infamy, alongside The Heidi Game, The Tuck Rule, and my favorite football calamity, Le Buttfumble.

Here was a marquee Wild-Card weekend playoff contest,
from the nonpaying public, all because the NFL sold the game to a mega media conglomerate, NBCUniversal, which wanted to use it, its paid streaming service featuring French bike racing and 19 zillion reruns of “Law & Order.”

Far be it from me to reject capitalism in the Journal, but historically this hasn’t been the way of the NFL, where TV socialism reigns, and it’s supposed to be for each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs—especially the compulsive gamblers. (The Chiefs-Dolphins joust was available over the air, free, in the Kansas City and Miami area, per NFL rules.)

If you didn’t ante up for Peacock, allow me to inform you that the Chiefs are back, routing Miami 26-7. I don’t know if the defending Super Bowl champs are all the way back, but they’re back enough that I’d be worried about playing them next. Andy Reid is doing clever Andy Reid stuff and Patrick Mahomes has the Patrick Mahomes Look.

Also: Taylor Swift is not a hex. More on that in a minute.

The weather was almost a bigger story than Peacock. Saturday’s game at Arrowhead was played in subzero temperatures—minus four at kickoff, which feels like minus 7,000 when you have to do anything besides sit in a running truck with a hot cup of cocoa.

Football lore is full of frozen classics, of course—the 1967 Ice Bowl in Green Bay was even colder—and we will ignore that modern players have access to heated benches that can grill an offensive lineman medium-well within a minute. It was very cold, cold enough that Andy Reid’s mustache quickly froze with icicles, making the 65-year-old coach’s face look like a merry arctic walrus’s.

Miami played numb. I tend to think the skepticism toward warm-weather teams in cold-weather games is overrated, as if the Dolphins would arrive at the K.C. airport carrying nothing but swim trunks and sunglasses. It gets cold in South Florida! It can drop all the way to the 40s, enough to warrant socks and make the iguanas drop from the trees.

Alas, the Dolphins couldn’t heat up Saturday. The Chiefs scored on their first drive and Miami didn’t appear terribly dedicated to tackling anyone to the hard turf. A long pass to former Chief Tyreek Hill narrowed Kansas City’s first half lead to 10-7, but they wouldn’t score again.

The helmet of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes breaks while being hit by Dolphins safety DeShon Elliott.

Mahomes was stirring and decisive. A month ago, the Chiefs quarterback his stone-fingered receivers and go live in a treehouse in Hawaii. Now his passes were getting caught and the Kansas City offense was gelling into something coherent. Mahomes even cracked his helmet on a feisty run, a sliver of red plastic flying skyward like a rental car bumper.

As for Swift, she was there, celebrating in a toasty skybox, tucked between Mahomes’s wife, Brittany, and beau Travis Kelce’s mother, Donna. I know Swift Fatigue is percolating, but can we please give the singer her Chiefs Kingdom due? This person sat through a Chiefs loss to the Raiders on Christmas. She schlepped to Wisconsin to watch them lose to Green Bay. She’s earned the right to enjoy a playoff win. Geez.

Earlier in the week, the analyst and former coach Tony Dungy blamed the coverage of Swift for “disenchanting” NFL fans, a curious observation, considering that NFL ratings are up big, possibly because of Swift, and Dungy was about to work The Peacock Game, perhaps the most single-handedly disenchanting programming decision in league history.

On The Peacock Game, I hate to say it but: expect more. Television, you may have read, is in decline, at least the old way of watching: the cable “bundle” is dwindling, replaced by streamers like, Max, Peacock, etc.

These companies need to grow, and it makes sense that they’d explore weaponizing the one thing on television everyone still watches: the NFL.

Taylor Swift celebrates with fans during the Chiefs’ playoff win. PHOTO: JAMIE SQUIRE/GETTY IMAGES[/COLOR]

That’s what Peacock wants to know: if you love it enough to pay them for it. The Sunday that 23 million people watched the game, a figure Peacock said includes those local audiences in K.C. and Miami. Peacock also claimed the game drove internet usage to “a single day U.S. record,” a major claim, if it includes the afternoon in Arizona and everyone: What color is this dress?

You’re already paying Amazon if you’re been watching Thursday Night Football, Sunday Ticket is off to YouTube,and as cable continues to bleed subscribers, more streaming games are sure to follow. The NFL’s desire for every eyeball is pushing up against the new realities of modern media, and if it wants the dollars for its playoff game, the Journal’s Joe Flint reported) it has to let its TV partners reorient their business.

(Allow me to disclose the obvious: I’m behind a paywall! I’m fine with it. If this doesn’t work out, I’ll be standing at an intersection with my column scribbled on a sandwich board.)

For football fans shut out of Chiefs-Dolphins, this is cold comfort. I will assure that you didn’t miss a classic. You didn’t miss emotion like Sunday’s Lions win in Detroit, in his skybox. You missed Mahomes playing well, you missed Kansas City looking again like a contender, and you did miss a little bit of happy Taylor Swift. And you missed Andy Reid mustache icicles.

Worth paying for? You’ll have to decide.[
 
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