On the Hilarity of the Possibility of College Football's Playoff

by Slate Quicksilver

We've been gone for almost 2 years, but it's worth mentioning that the 2nd to last and 6th to last involved some form of conference realignment.  It's almost like a time capsule.  We were prepping for the World Cup...  Brazil did not play England in the finals.  Stan Van Gundy was selling cars and weighing in on what he correctly thought would be an unpredictable 2010 finals between the Lakers and Celtics.  And we we're part of the conference apocalypse in the college football landscape: Four 16 team mega conferences were on the horizon.

We certainly weren't correct.  We nailed Colorado moving to the Pac10, we got Mizzou moving but not to the SEC.  TAMU was nothing but a fringe theory to the SEC because we thought they were inseparable from Texas, who we correctly thought weren't going anywhere (and didn't buy the Independent "no-conference" theory, either).  Nebraska was already rumored to be locked in to the Big10, but we also thought Pitt was going there along with Notre Dame and maybe a few others.  We definitely didn't see Pitt jumping to the ACC with Syracuse... though it makes sense.  And finally even in the most absurd thoughts, we never thought the TCU, Boise State and (lol) San Diego State would join the Big East.

Make no mistake, the whole alignment thing transcends the old geographic boundaries.  College football is no longer a regional sport.  Yes, it's hilarious that Boise State would be in a conference called the "Big East" but it's more because of semantics than logistics.  Airplanes, cell phones and hordes of scouts/coaches/"consultants" make college football a national game in that they can recruit players from anywhere across the nation just as easily as it is to send their players across the nation to play their new conference rivals.

All this realignment talk, however, is being put down at the moment by something that would be alter college football's landscape far more than anything like West Virginia moving to the Big12 (though, that does matter and we'll get to that soon).  The fact that it sounds like the BCS is dead, or at least dead in its current carnation, and its replacement could be earth-shattering.  Everyone except the BCS conference commissioners and a few very powerful university presidents has wanted the BCS deader than dead since forever ago.  We've had boondoggles (Auburn, 2004), revolts (Michigan, 2006), multiple hoodwinks (Boise State, 20XX) and outright robberies (LSU-'Bama 2011 part 2)... and that's just the National Championship game.  Let's also share a laugh in the automatic slaughtered lamb the Big East's slot inhabits, despite the fact that the conference is likely a well organized living art comedy joke not unlike the movie Borat wherein the comedy is really the reactions of the audience.  The BCS has been busted, there's no doubt about that, but we lived with it like a nasty cavity because there was literally nothing that could be done about.  Well, we finally have dental insurance.  The first thing we do?  Root canal, bitches.

The SEC and Big12 look like they'll be going to the prom with each other for the next couple of years.  The winners of each conference will play each other probably in the JerryDome in Dallas each year.  This will almost certainly leave the Big10 and Pac12 destined to keep playing each other out in the Rose Bowl.  The Big10 and its infatuation with the Rose Bowl is borderline stalker-esque and honestly we don't know how they would react if they lost it but it would probably involve a mixtape being made at first followed by incremental increases in stalking to point of kidnapping and then, well, this.  Presumably, the winner play each other in a national championship (/gasps... a real one!) and there we go:  a 4 team playoff.  But boy does that set a few people off.

The ACC will be none too pleased with that decision, but what can they do?.

The Big East will OK no cares about the big east (<- lost capitalization right) lololol.

The Mountain West becomes a second tier league to the Big12.

C-USA and the MAC may as well become D-2 schools.  Wait, they are D-1... right?

The WAC?  It died a few weeks back, honey, but thanks for asking and send your condolences C/O Robb Akey, Idaho.

Miami and Florida State?  Laughably irrelevant.  Wait... is it 2008 again?

Virginia Tech?  There's always some blue collared work to be done in the Virginia mountain country.

Boise State?  That's what you get for tying your horse to the anchor of an China bound export freighter.  (The thought of teams like USF, UCF and Connecticut being sent on a freighter to China is, for some reason, really really funny).

But the real loser in all of this is:  Notre Dame.  All of that talk about being independent of conferences and how it helps you and gets better exposure and blablablah...  how's that looking right now?  You didn't want to join any conference, and now it looks like the only way you can be relevant is to be part of a conference.  How funny is that?  Notre Dame's chickens could come home to roost and it will make them spectacularly irrelevant and finally truly leave them surrounded by the echoes of the past that they so desperately hold on to.

So, the College Football Playoff could turn out to be the most epic trolling of all time sports.  The big 4 get together and breathtakingly screw over everyone else:  particularly Notre Dame.  I'm 150% for it.

Though, let's get the name changed of the game between the SEC and Big12 potential championship game:  the "Champions Bowl."  That screams of the work of a bad marketing firm stuck in the 1980s.