Rigged System Ensures College Football Never Lets Cinderella Attend The Ball

It’s the last days before Christmas, a special time of the hardest year, and this is the moment reserved for a feelgood story about the little guy. This time of year, I used to write about a small college football team outside of Chicago, Wheaton College, where the players weren’t on athletic scholarships and the coach would snow plow half the field while the team practiced on the other half in the dark during a blizzard. Then, they’d switch sides.

So here’s the little guy story in college football this year:

Sorry, I don’t have one. There isn’t one when you’re picking among Alabama vs. Notre Dame and Clemson vs. Ohio State. That’s the College Football Playoff.

Ugh.

We’re charmed every year in the NCAA Tournament by a Cinderella story in college basketball. Gonzaga was one at one point. Loyola-Chicago. George Mason. Butler. They overcome circumstances and the realities of life being stacked against them. You fall in love with them.

But now, college football has systematically shut out Cinderella: Go home and keep mopping the floors, Cincinnati, Coastal Carolina, Louisiana-Lafayette. Clean out the fireplace. 

Even Indiana is the little guy in the really big, big time of college football. The Big Ten changed its rules to get powerhouse Ohio State into its conference championship game, which pushed Indiana out. And without the chance to win the Big Ten championship in its Cinderella year, Indiana was then pushed out of the major bowls.

Meanwhile, the Big Ten is working to adjust more rules for Ohio State so players sitting out with COVID can get back in time for the Playoff.

At this point, college football needs to expand the Playoff or just stop pretending and tell the little guys that they’re never going to go to the ball, no matter what they do. The evil stepsisters run college football.

The outcry over the Playoff was that another SEC team, Texas A&M, was left out, despite already having had a chance at being champs. It lost by four touchdowns to Alabama. Cincinnati was 9-0 with wins over Army, Tulsa and SMU. How about giving them a chance?

It isn’t a national championship tournament if everyone doesn’t even have a chance to win it. No, this is an invitational for the bluebloods of the sport, meaning the four who are there. You can add Oklahoma to that. Texas would be welcome, too.

The College Football Playoff is a rerun every year. They should play it live on Netflix. It’s a dinner plate filled with steak, pork chop and hamburger. All red meat. No variety.

Even Iowa State, despite getting to play with the big boys in the Big 12, isn’t really invited. The Cyclones were put in the college football world for the purpose of losing to Oklahoma.

You can see how this works in tiers. This year, the Cyclones were almost Cinderella. They are ranked No. 10. That’s Power Five privilege, but not good enough to really be considered. Along the way, they lost three games. One of them was to Louisiana Lafayette by 17 points.

Louisiana has a better record than Iowa State and the win over the Cyclones. Coastal Carolina has a better record than Louisiana, at 11-0. And Coastal beat Louisiana Lafayette.

So among those three teams, guess which one is ranked highest. Right, it’s Iowa State No. 10, Coastal 12 and Louisiana 19.

When the Playoff was created, the Power Five conferences were trying to swat away at the next tier down, the Group of Five. They threw tier two 15% of the Playoff money just to keep them quiet. I was there at the meetings and remember the Group of Five athletic directors privately being thrilled just for that.

But come on, this is just not right. These schools should at least be able to dream.

Those underdog stories really are the best stories in sports. They humanize sports. I get it that they don’t always draw the biggest TV ratings, but they do broaden the audience. For sure, 2020 should have taught us the dangers of playing only to your base.

So now the season will end the same way every season does. And my annual story about Wheaton? Well, this year their results are these: postponed, postponed, postponed . . .