You are not going to know who is making the College Football Playoff until the end of the season. Wasting your time debating who gets in now is a sad way to live.
The College Football Playoff Rankings will come out for the third time tonight, and, unfortunately, millions will watch it. Fans will watch as they find out which teams would make the playoffs if the season ended today.
The problem, of course, is the season doesn’t end this week. There are three weeks of football left, including conference championship games and the plethora of rivalry games during Thanksgiving weekend. Nobody knows what’s going to happen in those final weeks.
This has not stopped Twitter and nearly every television and radio talking head from getting up in arms about which teams were left out of the rankings. The debate begins with ESPN’s studio analysts and moves to the morons who believe what they tweet might somehow change the playoff committee members’ minds.
The biggest uproar comes from Alabama fans who have seen their team remain out of the top four for the first two weeks. The Tide didn’t deserve to make it with West Virginia and LSU as its two biggest wins, and fans didn’t have perspective of what future games might do for the team.
With its 25-20 upset win against No. 1 Mississippi State on Saturday, the Tide will be in the top four this week. It’s also going to stay in the top four and win the Southeastern Conference if it wins out, which kind of makes all the whining the last two weeks really meaningless.
Last week, Florida State fans began bickering after the Seminoles dropped behind Oregon in the rankings. It mattered a lot — instead of being No. 2 and projected to play Oregon in the Rose Bowl, the Seminoles were ranked No. 3 and projected to play Oregon in the Rose Bowl. Fans actually got upset about this.
Not all of these fans are as ignorant as they appear, and if they think for a moment, they’ll realize how pointless the rankings are. Some of that blame goes to networks like ESPN, the biggest culprits in starting these aimless arguments.
ESPN gets fantastic ratings for a Tuesday night by airing the playoff committee’s rankings every week. Then those rankings provide something analysts can talk about instead of, you know, actually talking about the games on Saturday.
One of the best parts of ending the BCS was we wouldn’t have this weekly frenzy over which team might play where. But I think ESPN saw a loss in ratings without a weekly rankings update, so the show was created to keep things the way they are.
The last weeks of the college football season are infamous for upsets and major changes in the season’s hierarchy. Fans might enjoy those weeks more if they ignore foolish projections and concentrate on the next game on their team’s schedule.
Imagine a week where fans talk about the big matchups instead of “Why is my team ranked here?” Imagine a week where college football fans actually talk about college football.
There are so many things students can do on Tuesday night, whether they go see LSU men’s basketball play Texas Tech or have a quiet night watching Netflix. Don’t spend the night feeding into college football’s nonsense.
Tommy Romanach is a 22-year-old mass communication senior from Dallas, Texas. You can reach him on Twitter @troman_92.