Copyright Arkansas Online
Some of us spent last Tuesday night watching the election returns from New Jersey and Virginia. More normal folks spent it watching the release of the first College Football Playoff (CFP) rankings. Since the best escape from our ugly politics is college football on the couch on Saturdays with chicken wings and chips and dip, some random comments about a season that is already well past the midpoint: The NIL ("Name, Image and Likeness") era is making a mockery of the preseason rankings, proof of which comes from three of its marquee programs, Texas, Penn State, and Clemson. Texas was the AP pre-season No. 1, with Penn State and Clemson ranked 2 and 4, each reasonably so, or so it seemed. By midseason all three were out of the top 25. Texas has, bit by bit, clawed its way back in, but the Nittany Lions and Tigers going into Saturday were a combined 6-10. No one saw that coming. Probably because it never had. No one, including James Franklin, saw his firing coming either. It was the sheer suddenness of it--Penn State was 3-0 and third-ranked when it rallied to force overtime against sixth-ranked Oregon in front of a raucous "white out" crowd of more than 100,000 in Happy Valley. Two weeks later, Franklin was out, despite winning 104 games in 11-plus seasons at a program that had been reeling from scandal when he arrived. It is often said that NIL and the wide-open transfer portal have turned college players into NFL-style "free agents." This is inaccurate, since players drafted by the NFL are bound to the drafting team for four to five years, sometimes longer if a "franchise tag" is applied after that first contract. Even as free agents they are obligated to fulfill any subsequent contract they sign, often for five or more years, with the value of those contracts limited by salary-cap considerations. In contrast, until various proposed reforms are fully implemented, just about anything goes these days for college players. They are free to sell their services to the highest bidder each year and move from school to school, in the process often making much more money than NFL players over the course of their initial contracts. This has made college players into mercenaries and shredded whatever little was left of the "student-athlete" pretense. Illinois fans always expect to be let down. Our excitement over the Illini being ranked 12th in the preseason poll, coming off last year's 10-win season, was tempered by the realization that for as long as memory serves, every time they start ranked, they end up unranked at season's end. After easily winning our first three games, including an impressive 26-point pasting of Duke on the road, we had moved up to ninth and the sense of foreboding grew still more. Sure enough, right on cue, the Illini went into Bloomington, Ind., and lost 63-10, the worst defeat ever suffered by a top-10-ranked team at the hands of a team outside the top 10. For their part, Indiana under second-year coach Curt Cignetti might have executed the biggest turnaround in college football history in the most improbable of places. Going into last season, the Hoosiers had gone 9-27 over the previous three and had the historically lowest winning percentage of any "power four" school (.423.). Since then, with Cignetti, they have gone 20-2, made last year's playoff and are second in the CFP rankings this year. Who could have predicted that, going into their matchup Saturday, Indiana (!!) would ever be a two-touchdown favorite at Penn State? The gap between the SEC/Big 10 and the other two "power" conferences, the ACC and Big 12, keeps getting bigger. The polls, including the CFP rankings, don't effectively capture this gap because they have always reflected wins and losses more than quality of wins or losses or strength of schedule. Win games and you move up, lose games and you fall, regardless of who you beat or lost to. Play in a weaker conference and you have a poll advantage as the season wears on and better teams from better conferences knock each other off. Which is why Virginia, Louisville and Georgia Tech (each out of the ACC) are ranked higher but would probably be underdogs on a neutral field matched against lower-ranked SEC/Big 10 teams like Tennessee, Iowa, USC, Missouri, Michigan or Washington. Perhaps even against unranked teams like Nebraska, Mississippi State, LSU or my Illini. No one wants to see a college playoff consisting only of Big 10 and SEC teams, but it is possible that at least nine of the 10 best teams this year are from those two conferences (with Notre Dame the only team outside them with a credible claim to be on that list, maybe near the tail end). Put differently, oddsmakers would likely bet on Alabama, Indiana, Ohio State, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Texas, Oregon, Georgia, and Mississippi against any non-SEC/Big 10 opponents. Prediction: The ACC and Big 12 will only get one team each in the playoffs and those teams will go one and done like ACC/Big 12 entrants did last year. Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
