College Football Final Four

04 Dec, 2016

The College Football Playoff’s selection committee on Sunday announced the four teams that will contend for this season’s national championship: Alabama (13-0), followed by Clemson (12-1), Ohio State (11-1) and Washington (12-1).

The Crimson Tide — who earned a sort of home-field advantage as the playoff’s top seed, drawing a berth in the semifinal game closer to their campus — will meet the fourth-seeded Huskies in the Peach Bowl in Atlanta the afternoon of Dec. 31. Clemson, the second seed, will face Ohio State, the third, in the Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Ariz., that evening.

The semifinal winners will meet Jan. 9 in Tampa, Fla., to decide the national title.

The first team outside the top four was Penn State (11-2), which defeated Wisconsin, 38-31, on Saturday night for the Big Ten championship. Another Big Ten team, Michigan (10-2), came next in the rankings.

On ESPN, Kirby Hocutt, the committee’s chairman, explained the selection of Washington over Penn State by citing the Nittany Lions’ two losses; although they were early in the season, one defeat came against a team that finished the regular season with four losses (Pittsburgh), and one came in a 49-10 blowout against Michigan. Hocutt also pointed out that Washington’s sole loss came against highly regarded Southern California (No. 9 in Sunday’s rankings) and that it beat ranked teams in Stanford, Utah and Colorado (No. 10).

Still, while Washington proved Penn State’s most immediate competitor for the final playoff spot, the Nittany Lions’ most resonant comparison is with their conference mate Ohio State. Because of a 24-21 loss at Penn State in October, the Buckeyes did not even reach the Big Ten championship game.

A conference championship is listed as a factor in the committee’s deliberations, and across the playoff format’s three seasons, this year’s Buckeyes are the only one of the 12 selected squads without a conference title.

A similar situation happened only a couple of times in the 16 years of the old Bowl Championship Series system, most recently when Louisiana State and Alabama, both of the Southeastern Conference, played in the national title game in January 2012.

Tom Osborne, the former Nebraska coach who sat on the selection committee in its first two years, explained in an interview last week that the listed factors — which also include strength of schedule and head-to-head matchups — are not boxes that must be checked but rather tools used for the larger goal of determining the strongest teams.

“The first thing you’re looking for is the four best teams,” Osborne said, adding, “Once you get down to teams that are very close and you’re looking for some determining, discriminating factor, certainly conference championship can be used to pick one team over another.”

Washington played much weaker nonconference teams than the excluded Penn State, but Hocutt, who is also Texas Tech’s athletic director, emphasized that Ohio State’s road victory in September against Oklahoma — No. 7 in Sunday’s playoff rankings — showed that the committee did care about teams’ schedules.

Alabama is the only team that has reached the playoff in all three years of the four-team format. The Crimson Tide also played in three of the last five title games under the B.C.S. system, meaning that, under Coach Nick Saban, the team has been in contention for the national championship after the regular season in six of the last eight years. A title in January would be Alabama’s fifth in eight years — an unprecedented dynasty in top-tier college football.

Washington is a much less likely contender. The program’s last claimed national title came in the 1991 season, and it finished the 2008 season 0-12. But under Coach Chris Petersen, in his third season after a fruitful tenure with Boise State, the Huskies went 8-1 in the deep Pacific-12 Conference before routing Colorado, 41-10, on Friday night in the league’s championship game.

The two other semifinalists have experience in the young playoff system.

In the 2014 season, which introduced the playoff, Ohio State made the field as the fourth seed, upset Alabama in a semifinal and then defeated Oregon for the championship. Last season, Clemson, as the top seed, beat Oklahoma in a semifinal before falling, 45-40, to Alabama.

For the second time in three seasons, the only so-called Power 5 conference without a playoff representative is the Big 12, whose champion this season was Oklahoma (10-2).

Next season, the Big 12 will join the other major conferences in holding a championship game. Still, having decided this year not to expand, it will stay the smallest major conference, with 10 teams. That could keep it, as the University of Oklahoma’s president, David L. Boren, put it last year, “psychologically disadvantaged.”

Western Michigan (13-0), of the Mid-American Conference, was the committee’s highest-ranked team from outside the Power 5, at No. 15. The only undefeated Football Bowl Subdivision team beyond Alabama, the Broncos earned a spot in the Cotton Bowl, set for Jan. 2, against Wisconsin (10-3), which was ranked eighth by the committee.

NYTimes.com

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