College Football Playoff finally being settled on field instead of behind closed doors, and the results are glorious

Take a look at that final four.

That weird, disorienting, beautiful final four.

One of Indiana, Oregon, Ole Miss or Miami is going to win the College Football Playoff national title. Can we pause for moment and celebrate how impossible that would have seemed a mere three years ago and how cool it is now?

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Here’s Indiana, historically one of the worst programs in major college football, bullying everyone to a 14-0 record and the well-deserved status as national championship favorite thanks to a genius named Curt Cignetti who was hiding in plain sight until he was 60 years old.

Here’s Oregon, the poster child for new money that hung around the elite for so long it became the establishment, hoping to deliver the national championship 87-year-old Nike founder and mega-booster Phil Knight yearns to experience.

Here’s Ole Miss, the school that never lost a tailgate party but also never won a modern-era SEC championship, trying to save its conference from a playoff humiliation while the coach who built the program watches from Baton Rouge because he deemed it easier to win a title there.

And here’s Miami, a team that wasn’t projected to make the CFP until the selection committee pulled a switcheroo at the last second and vaulted the Hurricanes over Notre Dame for the final spot in the field.

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Meanwhile?

Goodbye Georgia. See ya, Ohio State. Best of luck in your future endeavors, Alabama.

This sport has changed in ways nobody truly saw coming. But here’s a question: What took so darn long?

We should all spend the next 2½ weeks wrapping our minds around what’s happened to college football this season. In Year 2 of the 12-team playoff, the sport has gone crazy in the best possible way. All we ever wanted was a postseason where the teams deemed to be elite by poll voters or committee members to prove it on the field in a playoff format that looked like every other level of football.

Now we have it, and it’s proven one thing definitively: When you put teams into a tournament bracket, unexpected stuff happens.

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Even in college football.

Of course, we knew this last year when the 12-team playoff debuted, resulting in a championship game between the No. 7 and No. 8 seeds. But because those teams happened to be Notre Dame and Ohio State — the bluest of blue bloods — it didn’t really register.

This year, regardless of how the semifinals turn out, we are going to have a championship game between programs that have largely been considered have-nots for most of their history. And yes, that even includes Miami, whose dynasty era has faded so far into history — and with so much futility in between — that head coach Mario Cristobal almost recoils at the suggestion it can be recreated.

Which begs another question: Is this an anomaly or the new normal for college football?

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Probably a little bit of both.

As the playoff moves forward and likely expands to 16 teams — hopefully it stays there for awhile — we may not get a semifinal set quite this unlikely. The elites aren’t going to stay down forever.

But it would be a mistake to assume that this is only a product of the talent being spread around more evenly due to NIL and the transfer portal.

Obviously, it’s a huge factor. Programs like Alabama and Georgia can’t stockpile recruits and have an assembly line of talent ready to go when their best players move on to the NFL. All programs now will have roster holes. That’s just the way it is.

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But there is something about tournament play that should make us question how many national champions we remember from the past would have made it through a bracket that forced them to play three or four teams of similar talent.

Think about all the BCS controversies over the years or teams that were overwhelmingly talented but stubbed their toe at the wrong time and slipped enough in the polls that they never got a chance.

Take the 2012 season as an example. If you remember, that was the year the epic SEC championship game between Alabama and Georgia came down to the final play for a spot in the national title game against a plucky but undertalented Notre Dame team that managed to get to No. 1 by winning every close game.

Would either of those teams have survived a 12-team playoff that would have given Georgia a second chance, that would have included a great Oregon team whose only loss was 17-14 in overtime to a Stanford team that would have also been in the field? Oh, and you also would have had to deal with the team that beat Alabama: Johnny Manziel and Texas A&M, which was playing as well as anyone in the country at the end of the season.

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You think that might have been a fun playoff to watch?

Sure, as you go through history, there were certainly some inevitabilities that could have won a championship in any format. The Joe Burrow-led LSU team from 2019 comes to mind as one of those teams that was so dominant, they probably weren’t losing to anyone.

But as we look back through history, it’s fair to question whether some of those BCS matchups that were supposed to pit No. 1 against No. 2 were influenced by brand bias and preseason ranking.

It’s hard to come to any other conclusion when you see teams that were ranked No. 7 (Oregon), No. 10 (Miami), No. 20 (Indiana) and No. 21 (Ole Miss) four months ago survive the gauntlet and earn their way to the top.

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For far too many years, the paradigm of college football was based mostly on what we thought we knew about teams.

It used to be a beauty pageant. Now, it’s a month-long exam.

Finally, the results are in. They may not be what we expected, but at least we know we’re getting the truth.