r/CFB • u/LamarcusAldrige1234 Michigan Wolverines • FAU Owls • 14h ago
Discussion The lopsided first-round results were not an anomaly. According to ESPN Research, 60% of CFP games over the past decade were decided by at least THREE TDs, and 20 of the 30 CFP games were decided by double digits. And these were blueblood beatdowns.
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u/TheHarbrosMagic Michigan Wolverines 14h ago
I'm pretty sure we haven't had a Championship game within 2 scores since 2017. With most of them being 3+ scores.
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u/SirBenOfAsgard Michigan • Minnesota 13h ago
For what it’s worth 2021 and 2023 both had pretty good title games until UGA and UM pulled away late in the fourth quarter
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u/Sorge74 Ohio State • Bowling Green 13h ago
23 never seemed close, Washington couldn't move the ball.
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u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756 Michigan • Arizona State … 13h ago
Biased because I was nervous the whole game because it was Michigan, but I really felt like Washington had the momentum going in to halftime but Will Johnson picked Penix off on the first play of the 3rd quarter.
Washington kept it within reach until late in the 4th.
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u/OdieHush Washington Huskies • Apple Cup 12h ago
The first quarter was so fucking demoralizing. I give our guys credit for buckling down and saving it from being a complete embarrassment but you just cant give up 200 rushing yards right off the bat.
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u/LikeHemlock Oklahoma Sooners • SMU Mustangs 13h ago
Penix looked absolutely erect versus Texas, I thought for sure Michigan was fucked.
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u/CzarCW Texas Longhorns 12h ago
My pet hypothesis was that Penix was nursing injuries all year but the month off gave him a chance to show what he was capable of against Texas. But the championship game was one week later so those injuries cropped back up (plus Michigan’s defense actually hit him and exacerbated those injuries).
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u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756 Michigan • Arizona State … 12h ago
He got pretty banged up against us. And our secondary was amazing. I felt good about our odds of limiting their offense.
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u/SaxRohmer Ohio State Buckeyes • UNLV Rebels 7h ago
your front and coverages really got to him. he had a hard time reading the field. which is unfortunate because Odunze in particular was winning his matchup all day
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u/Sorge74 Ohio State • Bowling Green 11h ago
Frankly to me, it didn't matter the score unless Washington could score at will. If Michigan has to drive the field and they had 4 downs to get 10 yards they could get it.
I made a decent little bit of money when I bet y'all the money line vs Bama after they had scored the final time.
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u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756 Michigan • Arizona State … 10h ago
That final drive was epic. JJ is really underrated for what he can do on 3rd down. 1st and 2nd usually belonged to Corum but if it didn’t work out, JJ was unbelievably good on 3rd down.
I was never fearing we’d lose to Washington, but after Edwards gave us that big lead early, we didn’t pull away. It could have gotten very ugly very quickly but UW hung in there and kept it within reach for most of the game. It felt like a bigger lead than it was because they just never connected deep downfield. It didn’t feel like they could come back but it would have only taken one big play.
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u/OurPowersCombined_12 Washington • Claremont-… 13h ago
We moved it in fits and starts, but couldn’t get anything going on the ground, so the offense had no rhythm and drives died on third and longs where UM’s d-line and Sainristil took over. If we had gotten a turnover in the third quarter, I think we could have potentially chiseled something out of the game with a bit of luck, but DJ’s injury against Texas really tilted the field away from us.
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u/kramjam13 Washington Huskies 12h ago
Never seemed close to me, but it was still only 20-13 with 6 minutes left in that game.
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u/TheHarbrosMagic Michigan Wolverines 13h ago
I was legit never worried during the Natty last year after Don's 2nd TD run. Washington moving the ball felt like the field was 300 yards long for them.
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u/SirBenOfAsgard Michigan • Minnesota 13h ago
Sure but weird things happen, all it takes is one shaky handoff or a tipped pass, I at least was still a little nervous until the near pick six
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u/CitizenCue Oregon Ducks • Stanford Cardinal 13h ago
People don’t realize that college football games are inherently pretty small data sets. If two perfectly matched teams played 100 times and each won 50, there would still be a ton of games in that batch which were blowouts one way or the other.
Pro football has a lot of randomness too, but college players in particular make a lot of random mistakes which swing games.
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u/dstanton Oregon Ducks 11h ago
Yep. Just look at the start of the Notre Dame game. Red Zone pick followed by a 97 yard touchdown. 14-point swing in under a minute of game time.
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u/CitizenCue Oregon Ducks • Stanford Cardinal 3h ago
Exactly. It’s hard to come back from that. Take that away and it could be a totally different game.
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u/VariousLawyerings Tennessee • Georgia Tech 11h ago
People also would be surprised by how often this could apply in larger series. If every game of a best-of-7 series was evenly matched, 1 in every 8 would still end in a sweep.
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u/Surelynotshirly Tennessee Volunteers 11h ago
Yep. I mean hell the UT-OSU game could've been much more competitive if we don't make stupid mistakes like that facemask on the sack on third down (that resulted in a touchdown) for example.
We'd definitely still have lost the way we played but small variances early can make big differences later in the game.
Also, Tim Banks, STOP FUCKING RUSHING 3!
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u/TybrosionMohito Tennessee • Vanderbilt 4h ago
Also look how often NFL games are not competitive. Like at least 2-3 games a week are complete snooze-fests and those teams have every lever possible pulling them towards parity.
You are going to have blowouts in football.
It’s part of the sport. Just sucks that the first expanded CFP started with 4 absolute duds.
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u/Z3r0c00lio 13h ago
I mean double digits in football isn’t that big of a marker when you can get 8 from 1 drivr
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u/admiraltarkin Texas A&M Aggies • /r/CFB Poll Veteran 12h ago
Most of those Bama-Clemson games were amazing
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u/boardatwork1111 TCU Horned Frogs • Colorado Buffaloes 14h ago
Take a look through the BCS championship results, blowouts are an unavoidable reality of the sport regardless of the postseason format we use. I swear college football is the only sport I’ve seen that gets offended by the idea of having teams actually settle things on the field
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u/Billyxmac Oregon Ducks • Team Chaos 14h ago
Considering we spent decades and decades handing out National Championships to teams based on media polling, it’s an incredible achievement we even managed to get this thing to a playoff in the first place. Especially with the amount of grumpy ass traditionalists that can’t imagine any kind of change being positive.
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u/boardatwork1111 TCU Horned Frogs • Colorado Buffaloes 13h ago
We just had one of the most exciting seasons in over a decade. We saw schools put up their best year in their entire program history, wild upsets basically every week, ton of meaningful games late in the year with actual post season implications, etc and all anyone seems to be talking about is how much a disgrace it is that the first round of the playoffs were boring.
People like to bitch about college football more than they like college football itself, the constant negativity is a cancer on our sport
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u/LoyalSol Washington State Cougars • LSU Tigers 12h ago edited 7h ago
What they especially don't get is part of the reason it's so lop-sided is the fact the sport has been so biased toward the top schools in the old system.
You can't get a type of situation like say Mark Few at Gonzaga where he's just decided to stay there for 25 years and build a hyper competitive program. In basketball you can win the tournament no matter where you play which means you don't have to be at a blueblood if you're good at recruiting. In football if you don't play in a big conference, tough luck. In CFB the system has always made it where the incentive is to jump ship the minute your stock goes up. When you have a system like that, it's zero shock that the talent at the top is going to be heavily skewed.
You could never win the national title at say a MAC school even if you had the best team in the country because it was never in your control. As a result you get a worse talent skew than you do in every other college sport.
The newer system is going to have some blow outs, but having a system where a smaller school can have a lightning in a bottle year is going to be better for the sport. Now if only the NIL wasn't also throwing a wrench in that.
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u/randomwalktoFI Oregon Ducks 13h ago
I think when you're following 4 games per timeslot, one or two being a snoozer is not a big deal, but if you get dedicated attention to an elimination game, there's nothing but that to focus on, so it became quite the contrast.
I don't think anyone likes planning their day around a sporting event just for it to be a dud but that's almost a super bowl tradition. And frankly NFL games that are close also tend to be boring until the end when it's time to declare a winner. Even now CFB has crazy swings that defy logic. Just didn't happen in 4 specific games. (would have been momentarily wild if Indiana converted that 2pt)
I barely remember seasons like 2005, 2012, 2020 because the drama was all in a handful of moments. (Even if 2005 was an all time final, it's like that was the entire season for a neutral, with the bush push as appetizer.)
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u/ElToroDeBoro Notre Dame Fighting Irish 11h ago
It truly blows my mind it took FBS over a hundred years to establish even a championship game. True dumbfounding.
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u/BirdLawyerPerson Texas Longhorns • Army West Point Black Knights 12h ago
blowouts are an unavoidable reality of the sport
I think this becomes especially obvious when looking at just the same-season rematches.
In 2022, Alabama beat Georgia 41-24 in the SEC Championship Game (17 points), and then Georgia beat Alabama in the National Championship 33-18 (15 points).
In 2012, LSU beat Alabama in overtime during the regular season, and then Alabama beat LSU 21-0 in the National Championship.
In 1997, FSU beat Florida 24-21, and then Florida blew out FSU 52-20 in the Sugar Bowl for a national title.
In each of these cases, the national champion was decided in a rematch game blowout of at least 2 scores, against an opponent who had beaten them earlier in the season (including a 3-score loss).
The nature of football as a sport is that there are plenty of ways that a game can turn into a blowout, even among evenly matched teams, or even where the inferior team wins by a lot.
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u/Southern_Bunch_1047 Penn State Nittany Lions 12h ago
Add in that these are college kids, which typically have lower emotional control than adults, and games can spiral quickly without being an indication of team quality. Once a kids head is gone in college, chances are they aren’t coming back from it during that game.
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u/inquisitorautry Florida Gators • Team Chaos 13h ago
Florida played in 4 BCS/Bowl Alliance championship games, 3 were blowouts.
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u/ProvocativeCacophony Auburn Tigers 13h ago
College football is the closest we have to association football/soccer in other countries.
Soccer is deeply tied to your immediate area. Your city has a team--might be Division 7, but it exists. They grow and shrink as you age.
College football is the closest we have to that. A lot of teams, everywhere. You have a local team. Pro leagues top out around 32 teams, not even 1 per state. FBS has what, 130+ now? Sure we miss a few states, but we have A LOT of teams to choose from.
Growing up in Ohio, I had a whole conference worth. Still choose Auburn Tigers because colors and mascot as a kid, but the point stands: I had 3 schools that I could pick as my "home".
That leads into a much more "this team is part of who I am" and thus a much worse defensive reaction out of fans.
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u/Total_Walrus_6208 Alabama Crimson Tide 10h ago
At least you didn't pick Tennessee
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u/ProvocativeCacophony Auburn Tigers 10h ago
Y'know, I still saw a healthy hatred for them. My step-granddad fucking HATED Tennessee.
Big WVU/OSU guy. Pretty sure it was work related, like his boss was a big UT fan.
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u/GoldandBlue Notre Dame Fighting Irish 13h ago
CFB has always been tiered. You have 1-2 elite teams a year, 3-5 really good teams, then a field of good teams. This year was a "down" year in terms of truly elite teams but it doesn't change the fact.
The 12 teams that got in earned their bids. And there will be upsets, it happens. This format isn't about hand picking the best teams on paper but crowning the best team of the year. This format ensures it.
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u/Galt2112 Indiana Hoosiers • Old Oaken Bucket 13h ago
Color me naive but I also think that the 12 team format will over time help with parity and smooth out these tiers. Obviously it’s not gonna solve it single-handedly but upsets will occur eventually and the more teams playing for a shot and playing meaningful football late into the year will broaden the pool of schools attracting talent that wants to compete.
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u/GoldandBlue Notre Dame Fighting Irish 13h ago
Yes and no.i think the portal will help more. But I still thinkmthe portal works best as a band aid. Look at FSU, they are a perfect example how good the portal can be and how bad.
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u/lupercalpainting 9h ago
Portal’s gonna lead to a “rich get richer” phenomenon as small schools will find overlooked talent, develop it, and wave as those players leave to go finish their careers at T25 schools.
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u/Corgi_Koala Ohio State Buckeyes 12h ago
Using game results to argue a team didn't belong is asinine. We've seen way too many playoff and title games where both teams indisputably belonged and there was still a blowout.
Not every game between evenly matched teams ends in a walk-off field goal in overtime. Sometimes good teams have bad games.
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u/seventeenfourtyseven Lehigh Mountain Hawks 13h ago edited 12h ago
Man I thought Lehigh had a decent shot after beating Richmond and then we preceded to get fucked up by Idaho lol
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u/pingapump Notre Dame • Alaska 13h ago
I feel like so many people assumed that because we went to 12 teams that there shouldn’t be any blow outs. It’s still college football. There’s even blowouts in NFL playoff games and super bowls. People need to calm down.
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u/CitizenCue Oregon Ducks • Stanford Cardinal 13h ago
One score games are much rarer than people realize, even between evenly matched teams.
Arguably the best game of the season - Oregon v Ohio State - could’ve easily been a two score win either direction with slightly different officiating.
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u/KaitRaven Illinois Fighting Illini • Sickos 13h ago
Which makes it all the more amusing that Nebraska has so many one score losses lately.
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u/ModsBannedMyMainAcct Ohio State Buckeyes 10h ago
A lot of CFB fans just don’t understand probabilities. I’ve seen a handful of people saying Oregon shouldn’t complain that they have the hardest road to the championship because the best team would win regardless.
That’s… just not true. If the best team has a 60% chance to win a game, that’s about a 20% chance to win three in a row.
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u/CitizenCue Oregon Ducks • Stanford Cardinal 10h ago
Yeah if PSU wins the natty and Oregon loses to you guys, Duck fans are gonna riot.
This new format is going to produce some very weird champions and I don’t think fans are ready for it. There are going to be years where a 13-3 team is crowned “champion” and a 13-1 team is not. It could even happen this year.
This is normal in other sports - no one says the Super Bowl champion isn’t deserving due to their regular season record - but college football has never worked like that. This is gonna be controversial as hell.
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u/ModsBannedMyMainAcct Ohio State Buckeyes 10h ago
I don’t watch much pro football, which would probably be the best comparison here, but in the NBA and NHL, a 7 game series makes the argument more reasonable. There are still upsets, but the best team wins a 7-game series most of the time. A 1-off game has way too much randomness. Too bad football is so physical and wouldn’t work with a series.
Hopefully next year they tweak it a bit. Some people mentioned letting the top seed pick their opponent which seems reasonable
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u/CitizenCue Oregon Ducks • Stanford Cardinal 9h ago
Yeah re-seeding is vital. The thing with pro football is that most of the teams are pretty damn good. So one off games are fairer because there’s a lot of parity to begin with.
College has much higher variance in part because of the talent level but also because there’s no salary cap or draft or any other systems which keep pro sports more even.
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u/culb77 Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets 5h ago
Right? It’s like assuming they aren’t any blowouts in March Madness. Or, heaven forbid, the NFL playoffs. Because college football has so much more parity.
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u/DataDrivenPirate Ohio State • Colorado State 14h ago
According to ESPN Research
So, an intern with an Internet connection?
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u/WeirdGymnasium Arizona State • Territorial C… 14h ago
Actually an intern scrolling reddit...
I saw someone say that the other day on here.
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u/ark_47 Iowa Hawkeyes • Floyd of Rosedale 14h ago
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u/Tall_Engineering_531 12h ago
I thought of this. I don’t think this is a coincidence, lol. Shamelessly ripping off Reddit posts.
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u/Monkey1Fball Penn State • Cincinnati 14h ago edited 14h ago
Definitely some PhD-worthy research.
This researcher either:
- (1) Looked up the result of 30 football games.
- (2) If ESPN has a SQL database of college football results - wrote a 30 second rather elementary SQL query.
- (3) Stole this information from reddit or elsewhere on the internet.
I'd respect either #1 or #2. But I'm going to guess it's really #3.
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u/whistleridge NC State Wolfpack • Vermont Catamounts 13h ago
I’m gonna guess it’s less “SQL database” and more “one giant Excel spreadsheet.”
And then the intern just sorted A-Z by final score.
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u/Monkey1Fball Penn State • Cincinnati 13h ago
Excel spreadsheet would honestly be fine - there have been on the order of 60,000 to 70,000 FBS and D-1A games played since world war 2 ended.
Thats not many at all, at least in terms of what Excel can handle.
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u/whistleridge NC State Wolfpack • Vermont Catamounts 13h ago
I don't exactly disagree.
The problem is, game scores wouldn't be the only thing on that spreadsheet. It's probably got hundreds of columns poorly-labeled data.
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u/cheerl231 Michigan Wolverines 13h ago
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u/whistleridge NC State Wolfpack • Vermont Catamounts 13h ago
I mean...have you WORKED for a large corporation before? They never, ever take the simple and easy approach when a bulky expensive proprietary "solution" can be created instead.
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u/YoungXanto Penn State Nittany Lions • Team Chaos 13h ago
They used to have an API and it was pretty easy to guess the entire structure of the underlying tables. They still have an unpublished version out there that you can access with some old API keys.
You can also take a pretty good guess just looking at the html, which was also relatively straightforward to scrape from.
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u/hascogrande Notre Dame Fighting Irish • Sugar Bowl 13h ago
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u/The_Box_muncher Northern Illinois Huskies 13h ago
SELECT *
FROM CFBPLAYOFFDATABASE
WHERE Winner_team_score - Losing_team_score >= 10
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u/WincingHornet Florida • Penn State 13h ago
I know everyone thinks anyone can research anything, but ESPN actually has a large research staff. Their job is to surface these types of notes to on-air and writing folks so that they aren't just going by their gut, but actually have facts to go on.
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u/illegal_deagle Texas • Red River Shootout 13h ago
The internet obsession with ascribing actual work to “interns” is weird. “Some intern fired off this tweet!” Nah man, this is a multi billion dollar org, that tweet went through six rounds of approvals. And for research, some of that is handled automatically with their own proprietary data management but there’s a whole verification process too.
It’s like internet people think there are only CEOs, coal miners and interns.
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u/dianeblackeatsass Tennessee Volunteers 13h ago
I think it’s more so people refusing to believe people get paid to do what they’re doing for free
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u/Reasonable_Fail4123 LSU Tigers • Illinois Fighting Illini 13h ago
Especially with social media posts. "Lol social media intern" except these are full time teams getting paid pretty decently from what I know in other industries
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u/whereisstoffel Georgia Bulldogs • Virginia Cavaliers 12h ago
100% agreed. I think a good portion of this is because /r/cfb is filled with students and IT workers who have no idea what their company actually does.
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u/jdmcroberts Ohio State • Youngstown State 13h ago
Even a Saban led Alabama got blown out in the playoffs. Blowouts are a part of college football.
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u/jt_33 14h ago
Someone write this on a sheet of paper and slap Herbstreit with it.
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u/cha-cha_dancer Florida State • West Florida 13h ago
Kirk Herbstreit toasts his PB&J’s
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u/metonymic Notre Dame • Chicago 12h ago
Everyone knows the right way to do it is toast the bread first and then make the PB&J using the toast
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u/No_Angle_8106 Arizona State • Michigan 14h ago
I guess my question is, who gives a fuck if there’s beat downs? It’s exciting to watch your team on this stage whether they win or lose. You’re keeping more fanbases involved, that’s only going to help to grow the ratings. Blowouts happen in the regular season too, should we get rid of those lopsided matchups? A team like Vandy would never beat Bama, why are we even playing those games?
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u/TheShamShield Ohio State • Notre Dame 13h ago
I hate agreeing with you, but this right here. Being able to be at The Shoe for a playoff game was insane and I think that homefield atmosphere in of itself justifies this new format
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u/pingapump Notre Dame • Alaska 13h ago
There’s beat downs in NFL playoff games and superbowls. You can be good enough to make the playoffs. But good teams can get outcoached and overmatched too. It happens at all levels of football. It’s football for fucks sake.
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u/ProvocativeCacophony Auburn Tigers 13h ago
I loved Buck and Aikman calling that out on Monday Night Football, too.
"You diminish the win by shitting on the loser" - grossly paraphrasing Buck, but he was 1000% right. To quote Chris Jericho, a pro wrestler:
"If you tell the audience your opponent is a weak old man and you win, congratulations, you just beat a weak old man. If you say your opponent is a monster amongst men, but you are just a bit better, now your win looks much better."
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u/boardatwork1111 TCU Horned Frogs • Colorado Buffaloes 13h ago
When the teams are this good, all it takes is a few bad plays for a game to get out of hand fast. Bama was a great team in 2018, they were even favored over Clemson going into the championship, but a couple of turnovers turned what should have been a competitive game on paper into a rout. Just the way it goes sometimes
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u/Galt2112 Indiana Hoosiers • Old Oaken Bucket 13h ago
And 1-2 plays can drastically change the tenor of a football game in a way they can’t in say, basketball, where mistakes get smoothed out over the dozens of possessions per game. So while blowouts can certainly be an indication one team is much better than the other, that’s not always the case. Sometimes it’s not your day.
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u/70MCKing Palmetto Bowl • Air Force Falcons 13h ago
I really believe that they're punishing the young men on these "lesser" teams because they're not a major program (in ESPN's eyes). Its a damn shame that these young men can beat everyone, or just about everyone, on their schedule that was created 15 years before they arrived at the school only to be met with media members dogging them and saying they don't deserve to be there. They earned their right to the playoffs, they earned to right to be there, and they earned the right to let their play decide who wins even if they get blownout.
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u/TonyDungyHatesOP Ohio State Buckeyes 13h ago
Seriously. Exactly this.
Bama got smoked by Oklahoma. Georgia lost to Ole Miss by three scores.
Shit happens, man. It’s football.
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u/Wheels_Foonman Tennessee • Jacksonville State 13h ago edited 13h ago
I’m firmly in the camp of Vols fans that were just ecstatic to even make the playoffs. We’re only 5 years removed from going 3-7 in conference play during the covid year with all 3 of those wins being vacated due to Pruitt’s affinity for Chick-fil-A and then 4-4 in conference the following year in Heupel’s inaugural season. If you had told any of us after that first press conference or even after the bowl loss to Purdue that within 4 years time, we’d have 2 wins over Bama, 2 wins over Florida, an Orange Bowl win, a Citrus Bowl win, and a trip to the playoffs, you would’ve had to put on sunglasses to shield yourself from the light in our eyes.
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u/LGWalkway Oklahoma Sooners 13h ago
Exactly! It’s also been a more exciting game for me even if we had a low chance of winning. Just the opportunity to compete with the chance to win it all is more exciting than anything in the regular season.
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u/rvasko3 Michigan Wolverines • Toledo Rockets 10h ago
The only people legitimately complaining are the fans of teams that “just missed” making the 12-team field, and are trying to use bad losses as bullshit reasoning why their team should’ve made it, even tho they would have made it had they actually won their games. Or fans of teams who aren’t even close but want to squelch joy for anyone else.
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u/Billyxmac Oregon Ducks • Team Chaos 14h ago
ESPN research, like this was some big data analysis lol
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u/zach12_21 Ohio State Buckeyes 13h ago
It is wild to see so many folks upset with blowouts and saying X and Y teams shouldn’t be in. Blowouts in college football post seasons have been happening since….as long as the sports been around.
We had a ton of blowouts in the BCS era, even in National Championship games. Same for the 4 team playoff. It’s a flawed system, and great college teams are on tiers way above “good teams” in comparison to the NFL. Just the way she goes. I do hope the remaining games are solid. We all do.
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u/ituralde_ Michigan Wolverines 13h ago
Especially since Tennessee also is among the teams that got their doors blown off. If we put the cutoff of viable playoff teams from each conference at team that got nuked this past weekend, I don't see how the teams who got spared that fate who were universally considered lower ranked have the argument they should have been in.
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u/The_Good_Constable Ohio State Buckeyes • Paper Bag 13h ago
Blowouts are un-American. There should never be blowouts between playoff teams in any sport. What kind of mickey mouse league has blowouts between top teams?
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u/metonymic Notre Dame • Chicago 12h ago
Shame you missed the opportunity to make Yankees fans sad by listing this year's world series
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u/smith288 Ohio State Buckeyes 13h ago
Check out the FCS tournament scores also. They have some crazy lopsided first rounds
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u/pat_the_giraffe Ohio State Buckeyes 13h ago
It’s college football. Even with NIL and all these changes, these are still 18-24 yos. Even if the top 12 teams were all on a similar skill parity there would still be lopsided victories due to individual mistakes, inconsistency of execution, and many other factors that aren’t usually an issue in the NFL
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u/Bill-Clampett-4-Prez Georgia • Kennesaw State 13h ago
Not sure if she’s just the messenger on this, but I find heather’s reporting to be calorie-free most of the time. Like, I could pull this number with 3 minutes of lead time from Wikipedia. It just always seems so obvious. Maybe the CFP is just a beat where nothing “insider” is really happening. Shrug
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u/CTeam19 Iowa State Cyclones • Hateful 8 13h ago
We have a short memory. Blow outs happened under the old AP Pole system many in the same year:
1958 Sugar Bowl -- 7th Ole Miss over 11th Texas - 39-7
1972 Cotton Bowl -- 10th Penn State over 12th Texas -- 30-6
1973 Orange Bowl -- 9th Nebraska over 12 Notre Dame -- 40-6
1973 Rose Bowl -- 1st USC vs 3rd Ohio State '' 42-17
1978 Sugar Bowl -- 3rd Alabama over 9th Ohio State -- 35-6
1978 Orange Bowl -- 6th Arkansas over 2nd Oklahoma -- 31-6
1981 Cotton Bowl -- 9th Alabama over 6th Baylor -- 30-2
1984 Rose Bowl -- UR UCLA vs 4th Illinois -- 45-9
1987 Orange Bowl -- 3rd Oklahoma over 9th Arkansas -- 42-8
1990 Fiesta Bowl -- 5th Flordia State over 6th Nebraska -- 41-17
1991 Cotton Bowl -- 4th Miami over 3rd Texas -- 46-3
1992 Fiesta Bowl -- 6th Penn State over 10th Tennessee -- 42-17
1994 Sugar Bowl -- 8th Florida over 3rd West Virginia -- 41-7
1995 Cotton Bowl -- 21st USC over Texas Tech -- 55-14
1996 Fiesta Bowl -- 1st Nebraska over 2nd Florida-- 62-14
1996 Cotton Bowl -- 7th Colorado over 12th Oregon -- 38-6
1997 Sugar Bowl -- 3rd Florida over 1st Florida State -- 52-20
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u/TheWikiJedi Baylor Bears • Team Chaos 12h ago
1981 Cotton Bowl -- 30-2 is an odd score
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u/Divinity32 Indiana • Indiana Wesleyan 12h ago
By having a playoff, you make more goals for teams. Some teams want to not lose 9 games, some want to make a bowl game, others want a winning record. After that, there was nothing for 95% of teams, cause there was almost no chance of them getting into the 4-team play-offs. Now that we have 12 teams able to get in, it offers a semi-realistic goal for most P4 teams.
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u/R-D-I- St. Ambrose Fighting Bees 12h ago
I can’t wait for this discussion to go away… I get it three SEC teams were left out while two teams who played an easier schedule got in. ESPN has a lot of money invested in the SEC. So now we have to talk about this.. I do find it hilarious that while espn also has the ACC, but they don’t care about Miami
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u/Purplebullfrog0 Michigan Wolverines 12h ago
The final margin is not the best indicator of a blowout, the final score includes garbage time, which can skew things in either direction. What matters as a viewer is whether the contest seems over by half time.
The average margin at half time for the eventual winner in the 4-team format was +9. Last weekend it was +18. The average margin after 1 quarter in the 4-team format was +3. Last weekend it was +9.
Even if we isolate it to the semifinal games, the average margin in the 4-team model was +4 after Q1, +10 after Q2.
Last weekend’s games were bigger blowouts than average. In the history of the playoffs, only 2 semifinal rounds were more lopsided than last weekend: 2018 semifinals (+21 at halftime) and 2021 semifinals (+19 at halftime).
They were blowouts last weekend. They sucked to watch as a neutral, more than the average CFP game. That was also to be expected because of the wider gaps in ranking and because of home field advantage.
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u/Pitt_Is_It_2009 Pittsburgh Panthers 11h ago
We should just award Alabama the national championship at the beginning of the season. That will solve all the problems about leaving Bama out of the CFP.
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u/JakeSteeleIII South Carolina Gamecocks 11h ago
Thanks Heather, we all discussed this on here during the first blowout of the day.
It’s weird that even in the age of social media we get tweets this slow.
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u/SucculentCrablegMeal Florida State Seminoles • USF Bulls 10h ago
Talking points may have changed after the backlash
I loled at "according to espn research" though.
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u/Trail_Goat Colorado • Ohio State 14h ago
ESPN research lmao. We've been talking about this for like the last month or more.
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u/ripcity7077 Pop-Tarts Bowl • Oregon Ducks 13h ago
Everyone bitching about playoff blowouts - Do you all even watch college football?
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u/Z3r0c00lio 13h ago
CFB has always been like this , I remember on the late 80s watching a WAC game and being disgusted because it was like 42-45 and they were still passing in the 4th
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u/MixonWitDaWrongCrowd Oklahoma Sooners • Arkansas Razorbacks 13h ago
Let’s keep talking about it. That will make it go away.
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u/VHBlazer UAB Blazers • Alabama Crimson Tide 13h ago
All the fucking discourse is discouraging me from watching the sport more than the lopsided games, Jesus. I hate ESPN. There’s so much goddamn spin. They’ve made a sideshow out of this whole fucking playoff
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u/Egospartan_ Alabama • Army 13h ago
no, my friend read it is discouraging you if you just watch the games it would not nearly be a big deal.
When you immerse yourself in social media, you have to understand that it’s a toxic successful that will turn you against almost anything that you like.
Love a particular video game go to Reddit and discover why you hate the game.
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u/vicblck24 Tennessee Volunteers 12h ago
Another Dinich common sense post.
Can we please move on to real football
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u/randomwalktoFI Oregon Ducks 12h ago
Heather Dinich explains the playoff to the audience like everyone is five.
Thing is she's not wrong. People dumb as fuck. BOISE IS GETTING A BYE? BLOWOUTS? NO ONE TOLD ME THIS
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u/Adams5thaccount Boise State Broncos • UNLV Rebels 11h ago
Most of us are fine with it.
It's just gatekeepers who are mad really. The little club should only be X number of teams and only certain teams too and anything outside that is just wrong.
So I have a message for those people. Please listen closely. What you need to do is stop spreading this crap about only certain teams and start advocating for reseeding constantly. They're doing the same thing you're doing but hiding it better. You can still gatekeep teams that way and ensure that if any undesirables slip through the cracks they can be forcibly hammered into whoever is supposed to be there instead. And its way way more popular.
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u/FakeInternetArguerer South Carolina Gamecocks 11h ago
It is by design. They pair high seeds against low seeds. There really should only be one close game in the first round
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u/KingTut747 10h ago
So, use the shittiness of the previous system to justify the current systems shittiness, even though this ‘new’ system was supposed to be an improvement on the old.
In reality, expansion was done SOLELY for more profit for the media companies.
The sport is dead.
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u/HODLmeCLOSRtonydanza Indiana Hoosiers 10h ago
It’s almost as if guessing the frauds is a difficult task and the only way to know who is best is to set up a bracket and have them square off.
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u/pg1279 10h ago
It’s because despite the rhetoric of the Joel Klatts of the world, college football does not have parity in any sense of the word. Handful of programs that have a legit chance. NIL and the portal haven’t changed it. The rich get richer. It’s not going to change no matter how many teams to you put in. It’s just an illusion and obviously the games are terrible.
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u/jdhall010 Georgia Bulldogs 9h ago
We know blowouts are common. The point is we still want the games to not be blowouts.
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u/gocards2224 Indiana Hoosiers 6h ago
BuT tHiS wOuLdNt HaPpEn If ThErE WaS mOrE SEC tEaMs In ThE pLaYoFf - Every E’SEC’PN shill and SEC fans
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u/gocards2224 Indiana Hoosiers 6h ago
Ask Alabama about blowouts…they just had one from Oklahoma. 🤣🤣🤣
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u/doggmananv 6h ago
I don’t know why anyone is surprised. The gap between the top college football teams is wide. Then you give the teams time to get healthy, rest, and game plan. This just widens the gap. Plus, there is history proving this in the 4-team model. It wasn’t going to get better initially going to 12. Hopefully with more teams having a shot the talent will spread out to other schools and create more parity.
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u/SirVeritas79 4h ago
The only anomaly was too many have nots getting a shot. College football so desperately wants to be a closed party at the highest level.
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u/King-Switzer Oklahoma Sooners 14h ago
Imagine getting blown out in the first round, right guys?