Give UCF a Chance

Georgia and Alabama are playing in the championship game tonight.  Two SEC teams.  Boo!  But Go Georgia!  We will finish the year with one undefeated team and that’s UCF, who beat Auburn, who went 2-1 against Georgia and Alabama.  Of course, UCF had no chance to win the championship.  Now I would acknowledge that there was no reason to think UCF was as good as any of the top 7 teams in the college football playoff rankings before playing Auburn.  Auburn played four games against the playoff teams and went 2-2.  I doubt UCF would have done better than that.  Still, I don’t like that they went undefeated and had no chance to win the championship.  One of the great things about college basketball is that every team has a path to win the championship (as unlikely as it might be for many teams).  Everybody seems to think the playoff will eventually expand to eight teams.  So how does that happen?

I have a playoff expansion plan that I acknowledge isn’t all that realistic, but I like it anyway.  Expanding the playoff certainly could diminish the bowls in significance even more.  Right now, people pretty much don’t care about the bowls other than the two playoff games (and maybe the Rose Bowl when it’s not a playoff game).  If you had a round of playoffs before the bowls and then used the bowls as the semifinals, would the losers go to bowl games?  Because that would be weird and then definitely nobody would care about the non-playoff bowls.  I say you start the playoff with the bowls (two games on New Year’s Eve, two on New Year’s Day), but I wouldn’t have the bowls with a straight 1-8 seeding.  Here’s my idea:

Five Power Five conference champions plus the top Group of Five Champion plus two wild cards make the playoff bowls:

Rose Bowl:  Pac-12 vs. Big 10
Sugar Bowl:  SEC vs. Group of Five or Wild Card
Orange Bowl:  ACC vs. Group of Five or Wild Card
Cotton/Fiesta/Peach (rotating):  Big 12 vs. Group of Five or Wild Card

After the bowls, the winners are seeded and the top two teams get home playoff games.  The Championship Game is at a neutral site.

Here’s why I like this.  It greatly increases the importance of the three most historic bowls.  They always get to be playoff games.  And you restore some history.  Georgia-Oklahoma in the Rose Bowl was a very exciting game, but it was a little weird having those two teams play in the Rose Bowl (if that had been the Sugar Bowl matchup, it wouldn’t have been weird at all).  Under my plan, the Rose Bowl is always Pac-12 Champion vs. Big 10 Champion, which is actually pretty unusual now.  If the Rose Bowl is a playoff game now, it’s unlikely you’re getting that matchup.  If the Rose Bowl isn’t a playoff game, you’re definitely getting Pac-12 vs. Big 10, but probably not both champions because at least one of them is probably going to the playoff (this year was the first year neither of them made the playoff).  In the four years since the playoff started, the four Rose Bowls have featured three out of eight teams who were either Pac-12 or Big 10 champions.  I assume the Cotton/Fiesta/Peach Bowl folks wouldn’t like this all that much, but they are still playoff games once every three years, which is exactly the way it is for those bowls right now (I mean, I'd be fine with just having the Cotton Bowl be a playoff bowl every year, but I don't think the Fiesta/Peach Bowl folks would be too happy.

So how would you assign Group of Five and Wild Card teams to bowls?  You could do it randomly I guess.  I think my answer would be to avoid conference matchups (if Alabama was a wild card, don’t send them to the Sugar Bowl), but do it by rankings other than that.  So Clemson was the top seed so they would get UCF.

Here’s how this year’s playoff would have worked:

Rose Bowl:  USC vs. Ohio State
Sugar Bowl:  Georgia vs. Wisconsin
Orange Bowl:  Clemson vs. UCF
Cotton:  Oklahoma vs. Alabama

Ohio State actually did beat USC so let’s say Georgia, UCF, and Alabama won the other playoff bowls (I think Clemson would have beaten UCF, but UCF actually did win their bowl and nobody beat them, so let’s just go with it).  You could just go with rankings before the bowls or you could rerank them (maybe UCF gets a big bump for being the only undefeated team and beating the number 1 team).  But if you went with rankings before the bowls, the semifinals would be:

UCF at Georgia
Ohio State at Alabama

Now you might have people that are upset that the Pac-12/Big 10 champions always have to play each other whereas the other Power Five conference champions get a Wild Card or Group of Five team.  That’s true, but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee a tougher game.  This year the Pac-12/Big 10 champions were ranked 5 and 8.  One of the other Power Five champions is playing Alabama, who was ranked 4.  And in other sports, seeds don’t always go by actual team rankings.  In the NFL, the Jets could be the second best team in the NFL (I know, just go with it for a minute), but if the Bills are the best team in the NFL, the Jets are the 5 seed and they’re playing a road playoff game in round 1 and possibly playing the Bills in round 2 (bad for both teams in that case).  In baseball, the top Wild Card could be the second or third best team in the league, but they have to win a one game playoff to get to play the best team in the league.  In basketball and hockey, you can have one conference be better than the others.  The Spurs are going to have a tougher road to the NBA Finals than the Celtics.  That’s just the way it is.

The problem with my plan is that you’d have to play the semifinals on a Saturday and NFL Playoffs are in the way.  You could move back the NFL season to fix that.  It’s such an obvious plan to get the Super Bowl on the Sunday before Washington’s Birthday (the other thing that the country/NFL could do would be to have the Super Bowl played the day before my proposed federal holiday of Lincoln's Birthday).  Why hasn’t there been any movement towards playing the Super Bowl the day before a Monday holiday?  But the College Football Playoff Championship Game would probably still have to be on a Monday (which I hate) unless you made the Championship Game the third game of an NFL Playoff/College Football Championship triple header on a Saturday (check the end of this post for my plan on that).

I definitely don’t love playoff expansion (even though it would make it easier for Notre Dame to make the playoff).  My fear is that it would encourage teams to not play any good non-conference games.  You’re getting in if you win your conference and if you don’t win your conference, you still want to give yourself a chance at a wild card.  But everybody seems to think the playoff will expand.  So that’s how I would do it.

Mike Brey Appreciation Post

Mike Brey is awesome.  I’m long overdue for this post.  Four weeks ago, I traveled down to Newark, Delaware, to see Notre Dame take on Delaware in basketball.  It was the first year since before I was a student at Notre Dame that I didn’t get to any football games, but I wanted to get to a basketball game (as I’ve said before, Notre Dame is a basketball school now).  So Jon took the train up to Newark and I took the bus down.  I had previously made a point of going to Delaware for a minor league baseball game, but I’m pretty sure that this was the first time I’ve ever spent a night in the state of Delaware.

After dealing with Penn Station and the snow on the day of Santacon (not a day that I’d want to be in the city, but it was early so people weren’t too drunk yet), I arrived in Newark around 5:00.  Jon and I got dinner and watched the end of Army-Navy before going to the game.

The guy taking our picture could have easily gotten the court in the background, but he chose this angle instead.

The arena holds 5,000 people, so pretty much every seat in the house is fairly close to the action.  This was definitely Delaware’s biggest home game of the year.  To buy tickets from Delaware, you had to buy season tickets.  I actually considered doing that and then selling all the rest of the games on Stubhub.  Season tickets were actually cheaper than a lot of the tickets on the secondary market for this game.  But we monitored prices and bought at the right time for a reasonable price.  We were in the second to last row, but pretty close to half court.  The TV cameras were above us just off to our right.  It was a much better view than I’ll have if I go to the ACC Tournament.

Our view for the game

We were a little shaky early on, but we seemed to have taken control by halftime.  We led 38-27.  We played a very good second half and won 92-68.  Bonzie Colson, Matt Farrell, and T.J. Gibbs almost outscored Delaware by themselves (they had19, 24, and 21).  Colson and Martin Geben both had 12 rebounds.  We were 13-23 from three.  So it ended up being a convincing win.

Notre Dame played at Delaware because former Notre Dame player and assistant coach Martin Inglesby is in his second year as head coach at Delaware.  Mike Brey was also Delaware’s head coach before coming to Notre Dame.  He got a nice hand from the crowd during the pre-game introductions.

Mike Brey made the tournament as Delaware's coach twice.

This banner is from after Brey's time at Delaware.  No Delaware didn't win a game, they were one of 60 teams to get a first round bye when the NCAA insisted on calling the first round "the second round."

The next morning, Jon and I got a good breakfast and then he was off.  I went went to mass for the second Sunday of Advent and then took a walk across campus to my bus.  One day I'll have to try to figure out how many different states I've attended mass in.

Eggs Benedict with blue cheese

Delaware's snow-covered campus

Since the Delaware game, Mike Brey has passed Digger Phelps become Notre Dame’s winningest men’s basketball coach.  And today we won at Syracuse for the first time in 11 years.  It’s always nice to beat Jim Boeheim.  The last two games have been without our best player, Bonzie Colson, who might be out for the rest of the year (hopefully not, but we’ll see).  Also today, we didn’t have our second best player, Matt Farrell.  A lot of people were very worried when Colson got hurt.  I would put myself in the “a little worried” category.  Brey has had a lot more success than people expected in the past when we lost some good players (although not back in 2014 when we lost Jerian Grant).  We still have a lot of work to do, but we definitely still have a chance to make the NCAA Tournament.  3-0 in the ACC is a good start.  I love Mike Brey.

Some quick thoughts on football.  I wasn’t motivated to get to a game this year because of how much of a disaster last year was.  It turns out we had some really fun wins.  The game at Boston College was the one game I wanted to go to at the last minute, but I was hoping to go stay with John and take him to the game but it turned out that his wife was due to give birth that week (I hadn’t realized that the baby was due that soon).  It would have been fun to see us run all over Boston College.  The USC game was wonderful.  But then November happened.  The Miami game was a total disaster.  And it’s a problem that we can’t win at Stanford.  The Citrus Bowl was painful to watch at times, but it was really fun at the end.  It was a ten win season (definitely better than I was expecting) and our best bowl win since January 1, 1994.  But we still haven’t won a major bowl under Kelly.  And we had a very good opportunity to get to a major bowl at the start of November (the playoff was a legitimate possibility too).  I would like to think that we have to get to a major bowl next year.  If not, isn’t nine years and an 0-2 record in major bowls enough?

I hope to get to a game or two next year.  We’re playing Syracuse at Yankee Stadium next year so I definitely plan to go to that one.  I’d be up for a home game as well if my friends are going to any.  My preference is always September games (to avoid conflict with baseball playoffs in October and cold weather in November).  And I prefer attending afternoon games.  That pretty much leaves Vanderbilt as my ideal home game to attend, but I might be talked into one of the night games.  It’s also been a long time since I went to an away game on another team’s campus (part of why I wanted to go to the Boston College game this year).  Wake Forest, Virginia Tech, and Northwestern would all be interesting to me if I could get tickets at a reasonable price.  I assume it’s much easier to get to Northwestern than the other two.

Happy Birthday Lou Holtz!