College Playoffs Already Teaching Lessons

I think we all knew we'd learn something from the first year of the college football playoff.

And we have already.

- After the semifinals, we learned that, as many people conjectured, this Florida State team had remained undefeated without being the best team in the country. Oregon showed us that.

- We also learned that the SEC West wasn't, in fact, a league of juggernauts waiting to unleash punishment on foes from other conferences. That lesson came from five matchups pitting the top five teams from the SEC West against members of the B1G, ACC, Big 12 and a mediocre Notre Dame team.

- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we learned just how flawed the old system was and just how necessary a playoff really is. And that we learned from Ohio State.

When I say "old system," I'm lumping the BCS in with earlier eras. If we really wanted a true national champion, how many times did we miss that because of an inexplicable loss earlier in the season like Ohio State's home defeat against Virginia Tech?

In fact, in any previous system, few people would have cared that Ohio State was left out of the title game. Oregon would've been regarded as a snub. TCU would've had a complaint, as would Baylor. But the Buckeyes? They lost to a mediocre to bad ACC team at home; they wouldn't get any sympathy.

Yet in this new age, Ohio State won the B1G and then went into Bama's playground and beat the SEC champions.

So now we, myself included, have realized that we must think about teams differently now that we have the chance. If the top four teams in the country, and hopefully eight someday soon, are going to play for the championship, we need to stop pretending we know how to pick those four teams with our eyes and our logic.

The takeaway from this is that there needs to be that eight-team bracket some of us are clamoring for. There need to be automatic spots for the power five champions, because TCU also showed us that Ohio State might not be the only team from outside the SEC that could've taken down the Crimson Tide. The Horned Frogs thrashed the very Ole Miss team that handed Bama its only regular season loss.

My pick out of the Big 12 would've been Baylor, but for an eight-team bracket, both would've made it, and that would be OK, even though the Bears couldn't hold of Michigan State.

If we must have a committee or a poll get involved, have it select three at-larges to go with the power five champions. But there's a reason that every other major team sport has guaranteed spots for regular-season accomplishments. 

Because it works, and Ohio State gave us a glimpse of that.