In 1993, an 11-1 Notre Dame squad finished second in the polls to a 12-1 Florida State team the Fighting Irish had defeated during the regular season. Notre Dame fans were furious at being denied a national championship because of the sport’s refusal to settle its champion on the field. The school’s athletic director, Dick Rosenthal, did not share their viewpoint.
“(Notre Dame’s) position has been to oppose the playoff because we don’t believe in extending the season,” he said. “It’s a threat to the academic success of the student-athlete.”
Thirty-one years later, guess which school is hosting the first-ever home College Football Playoff game?
Notre Dame will host Indiana on Friday night in the first game of the first year of a 12-team postseason tournament. It’s nothing short of miraculous that four FBS playoff games are occurring on college campuses this weekend, given the decades upon decades of coaches, athletic directors, university presidents, conference commissioners and, of course, bowl executives, warning us of all the dire consequences were this day to ever come.
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“There would be a very serious conflict in the academic area should our team be fortunate enough to qualify,” Tennessee athletic director Bob Woodruff wrote in a 1971 NCAA News editorial. “It would require special (exams) schedules for us to be able to work more than one football game in during the holiday period of mid-December through the first of January.”
It only took 53 years, but Tennessee must have figured something out. The Vols are playing a first-round Playoff game Saturday at Ohio State. If they win, they’ll play another in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 1.
College football’s interminable debate over holding an NFL-style playoff dates to at least the 1960s, when several prominent coaches began advocating for such a system. One of the earliest was Penn State’s Joe Paterno, who did not live to see the Nittany Lions host SMU on Saturday in a first-round game with an expected temperature in the 20s with possible snow.
Their voices remained in the minority among college sports leaders for decades. It took until 1998 just to stage an official national championship game, at one of four bowl sites, and then until 2014 to hold a four-team Playoff. Anything beyond that remained a bridge too far.
“I have to tell you, I really do not see an NFL-style playoff coming to college football anytime soon,” then-BCS coordinator Kevin Weiberg said in 2005. He was right about that.
Academics was one of the main excuses (er, concerns) expressed by university presidents and others. Never mind that basketball players have long spent three weeks shuttling around the country during March Madness or that the College World Series extends well past graduation. Football players would surely flunk out if asked to play an extra game during finals week.
“They will wrench a playoff system out of my cold, dead hands,” then-Ohio State president Gordon Gee declared in 2007. Gee, now the president of West Virginia, remains very much alive.
Another big concern was that a bigger playoff would ruin college football’s thrilling regular season. In a 2008 interview, Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese cited Pitt’s season-ending upset of West Virginia the prior season that knocked the Mountaineers out of the national championship race entirely.
“If there had been a playoff, who would have watched that game?” he said. “It would have no meaning. West Virginia would already be in the playoff.”
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On the final day of this regular season, 16.6 million people watched an SEC championship game between two teams, Georgia and Texas, both safely in the Playoff.
As for playing December games on campus, generations of leaders whose schools might get the opportunity to host the biggest home game in their history found myriad reasons to say “no thanks.”
For instance, in 2019 then-Clemson athletic director Dan Radakovich said of potential home playoff games: “Have you ever tried to get a hotel (on short notice) in Clemson, S.C., or Blacksburg, Va.?”
Well, problem solved: Clemson is playing its first-round game in Austin, Texas, which boasts 50,000 hotel rooms. (Also, the CFP’s travel agency secured hotel blocks near all the major contenders months ago.)
And oh, the cold weather. Please, no cold weather. Never mind that lower-division schools have long played outdoor postseason games in Montana and Minnesota.
“There has to be some accounting taken of stadiums that have to be winterized in the months of December and January and the like,” Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said in 2021.
No need to panic. Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft said recently renovated Beaver Stadium is good to go this weekend.
“The heat is rolling,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”
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The root cause of all these excuses (er, concerns) was the sport’s undying loyalty to their friends that run bowl games. Generations of coaches, players administrators and spectators cherished their holiday visits to Pasadena, Calif., New Orleans and Miami and dared not betray the folks in those communities. Who, in no uncertain terms, warned of the existential threat of a playoff.
“Basically,” Liberty Bowl executive William McElroy Jr. said in 1984, “I think it would put the bowls out of business.”
There were 18 bowl games when McElroy said this. There are 41 today. Six of which will host Playoff games starting Dec. 31.
So, what changed? Why, after six decades of fighting, did commissioners and their universities’ presidents finally sign off on an event that will see Notre Dame, Penn State, Ohio State and Texas host Playoff games in the cold and snow of December? Why are they now OK with the athletes at Indiana, SMU, Clemson and Tennessee spending the last week of their semester practicing for a road game? Or with the four losing schools missing out on a bowl trip?
If money were the sole motive, they would have done this a long time ago — like in the 1990s, when a Swiss marketing firm offered to stage a 16-team playoff that would pay the schools $300 million a year, four times what the BCS was making at the time. (That firm, ISL, went out of business shortly thereafter amid a mountain of debt.)
The simple answer might just be that college football evolved. Drastically. Freshmen went from being ineligible to some of the biggest stars on their teams. Recruiting letters gave way to Instagram DMs. The I-formation and the belly dive gave way to shotguns and RPOs.
And gradually, over time — albeit with the speed of a 350-pound offensive lineman — more and more leaders became receptive to the idea that maybe, just maybe, it was possible to hold a bigger Playoff without destroying all we hold sacred.
You heard from a wide spectrum of Playoff doomsayers throughout this column. Here now, we salute the late Washington Post columnist William Barry Furlong, who in 1974 predicted the mindset that would eventually prevail, even if it took another 50 years.
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“If college football pretends to be a part of Americana,” he wrote, “it must recognize something of the American spirit. There are deeper currents in the American people than rah-rah and wave-the-pennants. For deep in the American psyche is a need to wind things up tidily, to have an end to matters as well as a beginning. The playoffs would respond to the spirit of the American people.”
Friday night, nearly 78,000 American people will flock to Notre Dame Stadium for the beginning of this historic event, which will wrap itself up tidily exactly a month later in Atlanta.
Here’s predicting the slog to get to this moment will have been well worth the wait.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photo: Sam Hodde / Getty Images)
