SMQ: As usual, talent rules the day in College Football Playoff semifinals

Cincinnati and Michigan fell to the two deepest rosters of the College Football Playoff era. Like most underdogs, they couldn’t overcome a huge talent gap.

Plenty of digital ink has already been spilled in the aftermath of this year’s Cotton Bowl and Orange Bowl semifinals. For the second time in eight years, we get an all-SEC showdown for the College Football Playoff national championship.

It is hardly something we should be surprised about this season. Bud Elliott of 247Sports has written extensively about the Blue-Chip Ratio as a barometer for projecting success in the race for a national title. This year’s Blue-Chip Ratio rankings placed Alabama and Georgia at the top of the list, making them prohibitive favorites before the season even commenced. Michigan, Georgia’s fodder in the Orange Bowl, also made the rankings—but landed far behind the two SEC powerhouses on the list. Cincinnati, taken down by the Crimson Tide, have next to no chance of landing in the upper echelon of talent as long as they are a Group of Five team.

It is something that shows up even more starkly when looking at the 247Sports Team Talent Composite rankings. Taking into account talent on the roster that season, including transfers, the Team Talent Composite reveals both how historically dominant the 2021 editions of Alabama and Georgia are compared to even their former iterations and how disparate the talent was in the semifinal games this year.

It was something that came up on Twitter while I was up on the morning of New Year’s Day, waiting for bowl games to start and thinking more about what we witnessed collectively on New Year’s Eve.

The last part of that Twitter chain is the most significant. While the Team Talent Composite only goes back to 2015, we can still see a clear trend in how Elliott’s Blue-Chip Ratio plays out on the field. In 12 of the past 14 semifinal games, the team with more compiled talent came out on top.

The two instances where the less-talented team advanced were Clemson’s victories over Ohio State in 2016 and 2019. In the earlier of those two games, the disparity in talent was the second-lowest on record. Clemson beat the Buckeyes by what remains tied for the lowest margin of victory of the College Football Playoff era in their 2019 showdown. In both contests, Clemson entered the game as the betting favorite.

Let’s take some time in the first Sunday Morning Quarterback of 2022 to think a bit further about why these disparities exist in the College Football Playoff, how we might reduce those disparities, and how the matchups might look in a 12-team field.