Deep into Saturday night, Utah lost to Arizona when Arizona couldn’t throw the ball forward other than for one play in overtime. It was preceded by an equal parts stunning and bitter loss for Stanford at home to Oregon … a team the Cardinal tortured when the stakes were switched and one was the hunter and the other the hunted.
Stanford knocked Oregon out of the national championship game in 2012. Saturday night, Oregon returned the favor, pushing the Trees out of the College Football Playoff.
On a macro level, it means the Pac-12 is DOA when it comes to the CFB Playoff, which adds serious clarity to the race. The ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, SEC, and Notre Dame can exhale, knowing that the champ of one of the bloodiest conferences is not going to make the final four.
But wait … is that what we want?
Most with a trained or even untrained eye would admit the Pac-12 has risen to, if not the best conference top to bottom, the second best in the country. The overwhelming depth of it makes it, in a top-to-bottom context, as good as it gets.
So where are we at with this playoff thing if the Pac-12 team doesn’t make it? Are we bothered by a really good conference, maybe the best, having its champ squeezed out?
At face value, yes, we should be okay with it. As we’ve seen the past two years, the team we think is the champ of the “best” conference isn’t always the best team. I don’t think anyone thought going in that the ACC or Big Ten were the best conferences the last two seasons.
Yet, they produced the best teams in the end.
The real question here is whether or not teams are “punished” for hoeing the more difficult row.
That’s a question to be answered at a different time. We probably came to our most clear weekend of this college football season.
The Pac-12 is out; Baylor is done; so is anyone from the SEC other than Florida and Alabama; and we’re down to these teams:
Notre Dame, Florida/Alabama, Ohio State/Michigan State/Iowa, Clemson, Oklahoma State/Oklahoma.
Your bottom line is that of those nine teams, four of them are playing for your title. Clemson is in the best spot, having defeated Notre Dame. The Tigers have almost bought themselves a loss so long as ND keeps winning and they win the conference, though the last isn’t mutually exclusive.
Ohio State and Michigan State will go weeding next weekend, and Florida/Alabama will eventually do so if Florida State doesn’t get to the Gators first. The Big 12 is the more curious spot, where you have one unbeaten and three one-loss clubs, two severely wounded (Baylor, TCU).
Whether you like it or not, this is fair. Hold the Pac-12 in whatever esteem you want to, but the end result still needs to be that one of its teams needs to rise above the rest.
We got clarity on Saturday, whether it’s the right message sent or not. This is as much parity as you’ll see in college football. Buckle up. More chaos is ahead.
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