SMQ: Expanding College Football Playoff remains as mythical as ever

A weekend of upsets revealed the value expanding the College Football Playoff — but no amount of expansion will change the mythical nature of the national championship.

The second Saturday of September often readjusts our understanding of contenders and pretenders. Sometimes those adjustments make sense. Other times we subjectively write off a team too early in the race for conference honors and national glory. September’s afterthought can quickly become fodder in the November discussions about the College Football Playoff.

All that is to say that we cannot immediately dismiss a team like Texas A&M merely because of an early upset to what could ultimately prove to be a really good Group of Five program. (Notre Dame’s loss to Marshall is a bit different, given they now find themselves in a two-loss hole early in the season and must win 10 straight to have any shot.)

Yes, a loss hurts. But just like Texas A&M, Wisconsin should not assume everything is lost from their bigger goals after losing at Camp Randall Stadium to Washington State. And those teams that lost to lower-ranked teams in Top 25 matchups — Baylor against BYU, Florida against Kentucky, and Pittsburgh against Tennessee — have little to worry about in the grand scheme of a college football season.

Under the current four-team College Football Playoff system, the road will be much steeper for each of these teams. Of that there is no doubt. But an early loss is hardly insurmountable, as both of the first two Playoff champions proved in their runs to their respective titles. Their championship seasons reveal the folly of dismissing a potential contender too early in the year.

At the same time, a deeper look at College Football Playoff history shows plenty of other contenders that have been written off early in the season thanks to a September loss. In this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback, let’s look back at the championship runs of Ohio State in 2014 and Alabama in 2015 before turning our attention to some teams that didn’t receive as much love from the College Football Playoff committee.

In taking this approach, we will see how the national championship is no less mythical in the College Football Playoff era than it was in previous eras of the sport’s long history. And we can then reconcile how the recent announcement of an expansion to 12 teams is a good thing for the sport — and, simultaneously, not something that will change the mythical nature of the national championship moving forward.