Originally, when the Michigan Wolverines beat the Ohio State Buckeyes 13-10 and decided to plant their flag on the Buckeyes logo, I found it amusing. The fact that those Buckeyes who'd just gotten embarrassed decided to fight the Wolverines over the disrespectful gesture made me roll my eyes. You had 60 minutes to fight—don't start now.
This feeling lasted until later that evening, however, when I watched my beloved, terrible Florida State lose to our rivals, the Florida Gators. Which was expected. But when those Gators tried to plant their flag on our logo, I felt my blood boil. And when Florida State's players started fighting to defend our field from desecration, I felt pride—although the team didn't put up much of a fight there, either. But my divergent response to identical acts forced me to ask myself why I suddenly, hypocritically got upset seeing those Gators do what I supported the Wolverines doing. The answer is simple: It's because this still matters. The game, the rivalry, the aftermath—it all matters, to the fans and players.
There's been a lot of consternation this year about what the 12-team playoff might do to our beloved bloodsport. Over the past decade, the playoff has done a lot to devalue the bowl system and what constitutes a good season for a football program. A 12-team playoff, the thinking goes, would only further undermine the importance of regular-season records, rivalry games, conference championships, and bowl games. And yet, when it has come down to the actual playing of the games this year, you would not ascertain that anything has been watered down. You could see this, for instance, when Vanderbilt beat Alabama (ranked No. 1 at the time) for the first time in program history, in how those students and players celebrated like they'd won the whole damn thing.
"Games like this change your life," Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia said about the win. Exactly. That's why it matters. Georgia Tech's wins over Florida State and Miami felt triumphant, regardless of what the final analysis of those two opponents says of their quality. And when Tech took Georgia to eight grueling, incredibly dumb overtimes, you would've thought they were entering football Valhalla. As much as everyone wants to bellyache about flag planting and whether it's unsportsmanlike or not, what it represents is how much these rivalries—deep-seated and built over decades—matter to these schools, regardless of what the playoff thinks of them.
When Northern Illinois beat Notre Dame, it seemed like the harbinger of doom for the Irish, and was certainly the greatest moment in program history for NIU, with coach Thomas Hammock shedding tears over the win. Three months later, Notre Dame is in line for one of the higher playoff seeds, which nominally might make the NIU game look meaningless. But it still means everything to NIU, who, even in a world where the Irish win it all, would get to claim personal dominion over the national champs. Along similar lines, there was the elation on coach Mark Stoops's face when his derelict Kentucky squad went to Oxford and upset then-undefeated Ole Miss, Kentucky's first win in that stadium since 1978. There was the ecstasy of the Sun Belt Conference's JMU Dukes running the Tar Heels out of their own building and sealing Mack Brown's fate. Evidence of the enduring importance of the games is everywhere.
Try and tell the fans of Texas Tech and Texas that the games don't matter while they're throwing garbage on the field over bad calls, or say it to the students taking part in all those field stormings, each one more glorious than the next. College football is about the celebration of football and alma mater every single Saturday, a testament to being young and alive and maybe full of enough potential to win even just this weekend's game. No amount of corporate interests or television-show playoffs or incoming private equity money can easily change that fact. At its foundations, this is a goofy sport played by kids and celebrated by both kids and adults reminiscing when they were those kids. It is chaotic and full of animus towards one another for slight infractions or just for happening to be in the same state as the other. As the College Football Playoff committee shifts teams around the board based on brand viability and loose guidelines over what dictates being the best in the sport, it is the games by themselves that make college football what it is. And, thankfully, it'll take a lot more than an expanded playoff to dilute the game's still-potent essence.
