All things College Football Playoff in 2020: A Blitz Podcast

The regular season is now complete in this pandemic-inflected 2020 season. The College Football Playoff has released their final four and New Year’s Six.

Normally during Christmas week, we would have already spent the past several weeks dissecting who reached the College Football Playoff and which teams landed New Year’s Six bids. With the coronavirus pandemic impacting everything around college football this season, conference championship games pushed back two weeks on the calendar. Hence we only learned on December 20 which teams made the various cuts and where everyone would go bowling.

In this week’s Saturday Blitz Podcast, the discussion centers on final rankings around college football. The first segment focuses specifically on the last batch of Top 25 rankings from the College Football Playoff selection committee. After doing our level best to offer up some things that the committee got right this postseason, the discussion turns to the longer list of what the selectors got wrong with their decisions.

After the first break, we go into more depth about the cancellation of the Rose Bowl game and the shift of the College Football Playoff semifinal to AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. What does the “Jerry World Bowl” do to break through the myths about the sanctity of bowl games like the Granddaddy of ’em All? Beyond the Rose Bowl, how will the broader course of the 2020-2021 postseason schedule — with its canceled bowl games, players opting out, and whole teams electing not to participate — reshape our perceptions about bowls and how they fit into the sport?

In the third segment, we converse about a topic John recently wrote about for Saturday Blitz about how Group of Five coaches voted for Cincinnati and Coastal Carolina in the final Coaches Poll at the end of the regular season. Going over the aggregated data of 30 coaches’ ballots, we discuss some various reasons why Group of Five coaches might hesitate to rate themselves among the top teams in the country.

The last two segments circle back to the College Football Playoff, with a look at each New Year’s Six game and the two semifinals in New Orleans and Arlington.

Check out this week’s episode of the Saturday Blitz Podcast through the player above, or click through to download it to your favorite device.

The Saturday Blitz Podcast goes live every Wednesday morning. You can reach John Mitchell at @jlmitchell93 and Zach Bigalke at @zbigalke on Twitter.