For those not in the loop (read: insane) on the myriad recent developments in the landscape of college football, I think it needs to be emphasized and re-emphasized: the 12-team playoff was supposed to be absolutely HUGE. ESPN bought the rights to broadcast it - just 11 games in all - for over a billion a year. Power Four conference championship games, now near-definitionally play-ins for the playoff, received the highest ratings and got incredible games, with the SEC championship going to overtime, and the ACC championship coming all the way down to the wire right with it. College football was willingly jumping into a ratings war with the NFL, dropping massive games into its late-December Saturday windows for the first time in a long time. Post-season college football, for the first time, and for one week only, on college campuses. For weeks, ESPN was broadcasting commercials hyping up the playoff set to "Les Fleurs" by Minnie Riperton, a song that I only recognize from Jordan Peele using it to soundtrack the end of the world as we know it. Expectations absolutely sky-high, absolutely full to bursting with pure, undiluted hype.

As it always seems to happen when we put a ton of stock into an event, trying to force narratives and a good game, it backfired in all of our faces. Well - not quite a full backfiring, but disappointment still feels like the best way to describe it. Throughout the entire week, we got the most boring outcome for anyone with a pulse - underdogs got absolutely trounced up and down the slate. From ESPN's win probability calculator, the last time underdog Indiana had more than a 20% chance to win was with 7:26 left in the 1st quarter. SMU had the same chance with 13:28 left in the 2nd, and never got there again. 13:31 in the 2nd for Clemson, and 10:48 in the 1st for Tennessee. Even despite some of the final scores looking like reasonable games that might have gotten a little out of hand, none of these games looked like anything interesting through their first frames. Invariably, the lower-seeded road teams only managed to put up 10 or less points by the half, and no home team got less than 17 in the same time. The closest any team got to making things interesting was Clemson, who managed to string together some drives and stops to get within one score of Texas, who instantly responded with a breakaway run for a score that instantly put the game on ice. Just to illustrate how bad things were getting, in the middle of the aforementioned Texas-Clemson game, I threw on some regular season college basketball just to get the juices flowing.

The worst thing about these games is how they confirmed everything that the nay-sayers and bandwagoners had to say about this playoff, and the teams that got selected for it. All year, we had to listen to the idea that 11-1 Indiana didn't deserve the spot because they hadn't played a difficult schedule, and their reward for surmounting that to get in is getting choked out by Notre Dame on national TV. Similarly for SMU, so many people wanted to see Alabama or South Carolina in that spot despite their losses to bad teams, and this result is exactly what they wanted to see. Our only hope to prove that underdogs can still make it is for Arizona State or Boise State to pull off any kind of upset in the semifinals, or any of the fun we could have had seems likely to vanish. (Unless we get Ohio St-Penn St again for the national championship, in which case the lulz are back on the menu)