Cinderellas Work In College Basketball, Not Football, According To Josh Pate

The big debate online leading up to this year's College Football Playoff is about whether we should allow the Group of 5 teams into the dance.

The arguments have been flimsy, at best, but the main point in all of this is, right now, as the rules are structured, James Madison and Tulane deserve to be in it based on the current system.

That hasn't stopped many from pointing out that college basketball's March Madness has plenty of Cinderella stories.

One media personality who is pushing back on this is Josh Pate, and on the latest edition of Josh Pate's College Football Show, he laid out in plain English why this is such a dumb argument.

Cinderellas Don't Happen In College Football

Every year we hear the same arguments about chaos in college basketball and why college football should be more like March Madness.

It will NEVER work, and Pate brilliantly breaks down why that's the case.

"There aren't Cinderellas in college football," Pate explains. "There never will be."

"Do not apply football logic to basketball, and do not apply basketball logic to football. They are apples to oranges."

He's absolutely right about that.

For one, the way the game is structured in basketball is much more conducive to upsets at a larger scale.

A team could randomly get hot from three and take down a juggernaut on a bad shooting night. That kind of thing can't happen in football because all the best teams are way more physically dominant 99% of the time.

The sport of football isn't built for fairytales.

As Pate says, "No one is stringing together three or four wins and winning a national title as a Cinderella in college football."

People point out random upsets that have happened in the regular season or in bowl season and try to apply the transitive property, or they show some anomalous freak like Khalil Mack playing for Buffalo and use it as an example as to why they have the same athletes as Georgia.

These are the same people who say things like "J.J. Watt was a two star, therefore recruiting rankings are meaningless," while ignoring mountains of data to the contrary.

For every example of a G5 team upsetting a mid-tier SEC school or keeping it close with a playoff contender, I can find hundreds of other examples of those same teams getting crushed in other games.

The house always wins, in this scenario, meaning, eventually, the more physical teams with the bigger budgets will almost always come out on top with a larger sample size.

But that's not all of it.

Modern Cinderellas Are Impossible

Everyone loves to go back to 2006 Boise State or 2017 UCF as examples of why we should let more G5 schools into the dance, and while we should never ignore the fact that even those teams would never be able to win a national championship, they wouldn't exist in the modern era.

And the reason for that is twofold: NIL and the transfer portal.

"If a Group of Five team ever started to look like a Cinderella today, they’d get raided — players, coaches, everybody," says Pate.

 "The moment a Cinderella starts to pop its head up, the players get poached and the coaches leave."

Pate even brings up examples like Boise State and UCF from decades past, but the message is the same.

"Those stories will never happen again. They’ll never happen again because the moment they start to happen, they get raided."

The very thing that everyone touted as a way to shrink the gap between the traditional powers and Cinderella's has only widened the gulf between the two.

What it's really done has made everyone at the top of the food chain closer to one another from a talent disparity perspective.

The 8th ranked roster is no longer as far away from the 2nd ranked one as it was in years past, but the 50th ranked roster is getting left even farther behind.

The Reality Of The Situation

In the end, March Madness is exciting because it embraces the chaos.

College football, on the other hand, isn't built for chaos on a grand scale.

Sure, a team like Purdue can jump up and bite a team like Ohio State in the regular season, but in a playoff format, a Cinderella will never be able to replicate that performance consistently enough to win it all.

"We love Cinderellas in basketball because we believe they’re possible," Pate explains, "In football, they’re not."

You may not like it – it's a harsh reality for any of the "have-nots" in college football – but that's the way it is.

College football was never meant to crown an underdog as a champion, and it's not getting any easier in the modern era.

The sooner we accept that reality, the better.