2022 College Football Discussion & Pick'em Thread

[Хahar 🤔]

Anyway, I've been ruminating and I think my preferred college football postseason set-up would be something that preserved all of the historical bowl tie-ins (i.e., #1 SEC vs #1 Big 12 in the Sugar; #1 PAC-12 vs #1 Big 10 in the Rose, etc.) and then had a committee pick the two best teams to play off in a national championship game the 2nd week of January.

This is what I thought the extra BCS championship game would be when they announced it back in 2005 or whatever. I don't know why this idea has never been seriously considered.

Anyway, as ever, I'm sick of the media-industrial complex telling me that actually this is something I want just because they're on the take from ESPN. I've found myself much less interested in college football this year than I usually am. Maybe this will pass, but it certainly doesn't help that every time I turn on a game I'm bombarded with WHO'S IN?????? I don't care.

[Хahar 🤔]

Stanford has named Sacramento State Head Coach Troy Taylor to fill their vacancy.

I'll admit, I was at least expecting Stanford to name someone with history as an FBS Head Coach (maybe Jeff Tedford or Brady Hoke), but Taylor does have history coaching in California, having, in addition been the head coach at Sacramento State, been a position coach at Cal for from 1996 to 2000.

That's why he's a great hire. Not only has he been remarkably good at Sac State, but he's a Cal guy, and now Cal can't hire him. And  Cal.

Can't help feeling his success or failure, however, will depend on things well outside his control — namely, how willing the admin is to embrace NIL & to allow coaches to get talent from the portal. Make up some masters programs for em.

Jim Harbaugh's great success at Stanford wasn't so much X's and O's (although he's good at that) as it was getting the university to buy into being good at football. Stanford's success is heavily dependent on whether the administration cares about football at all, and at the moment the answer seems to be that it doesn't. (It doesn't care about men's basketball, either, which is different from when I was growing up.)

Personally I'm prejudiced against Troy Taylor because of his last game at Sacramento State: the national semifinal against Incarnate Word two nights ago. I was thinking about going since tickets were only $5, but I drive an electric car that might have enough range to get to Sacramento but also might not.

Anyway, it was a great game, and the Hornets were down three with two timeouts left when they picked up a first down with sixteen seconds on the clock. The logical thing for Troy Taylor to do here would be to use one of his two timeouts. If he for some reason had forgotten that he had those timeouts, the logical thing would be to call for a spike that could have been executed as soon as the ball was spotted without running off more than a second or two. In any case, Troy Taylor did nothing at all, and when finally Sacramento State got off a play and threw an incomplete pass that stopped the clock, eleven seconds had come off and there were only five seconds remaining, not enough time to run a play to get into field goal range. The game ended on a failed Hail Mary, but Troy Taylor still had his two timeouts in hand! I've seen enough football to have seen plenty of bad clock management, but I'm not sure I've seen anything that looked quite like that.

[Хahar 🤔]

Utah State is in a bowl? Is this a prank?

This is the tenth time in the last twelve seasons that Utah State has played in a bowl game, so as the forum's leading Aggies fan I'd like for you to show some respect.

[Хahar 🤔]

I 100% support an expanded playoff (in fact, I think it should be 24 to give basically every P5 program hope that they can get in and make a run, and allowing an autobid for every G5 conference to give those teams something to play for too), but under the 4-team model, there's just no way that any other team could have gotten in with the way the season played out.

12 teams is bad enough but c'mon...24!?  Scraping that far down into the barrel gets too messy.  How do you justify picking some 3-loss teams over others?  More teams realistically on the bubble only creates more unhappy fanbases and more calls for further expansion.  And for what?  We just saw the "No. 2" team in the country get blown-out in spectacular fashion.  There's too much separation in college football for a 12-team playoff to even be fun to watch, much less competitive.       

There was potential for a surprise when the semifinals this year didn't deliver the typical blowouts, but last night came through like none other and showed that, just like nearly every year, four teams was too many this year. This season would have been perfect for the system I grew up with, since there were exactly two undefeated teams from major conferences. Georgia and Michigan would have been a perfectly compelling game, but instead thanks to a fluke result that never needed to happen we got last night's snoozefest. There are almost never four teams that are all worthwhile contenders (2014 is the only instance I can recall), which is why there are so many lopsided results year after year. Of course nobody in the media will tell you that because constant expansion is the only thing that lines ESPN's pockets.

I saw this Twitter post, which feels like what we normally see from playoff fans:

https://twitter.com/chris_sowers/status/1612850156960899073

Naturally this ignores that if the playoff weren't so large already, a team with no hope of competing like TCU wouldn't have to have been weeded out. The amazing thing about playoff fans is that literally everything is an argument to expand the playoff. There was no possible result that would not have produced this reaction.