Alabama rises up to take top spot again
Tide jumps over Michigan, which will face Georgia in Orange Bowl
The football turbulence strewn across recent months yielded to a breezy choice of four teams for the eighth College Football Playoff on Sunday. Arranging the four proved the only brainteaser.
Alabama, Michigan, Georgia and Cincinnati won bids Sunday when the 13member selection committee issued its final findings after its six weekly meetings in Grapevine, near DFW airport. The teams appeared in that order, meaning No. 1 Alabama (12-1) will play No. 4 Cincinnati (13-0) in one semifinal at the Cotton Bowl on New Year’s Eve at 2:30 p.m. Central time, and No. 2 Michigan (12-1) will play No. 3 Georgia (12-1) in the other semifinal at the Orange Bowl, also on New Year’s Eve, at 6:30 p.m.
Alabama hogged its seventh playoff berth in eight seasons — alongside Georgia’s second, Michigan’s first and Cincinnati’s first — and became a No. 1 seed for a whopping fifth time, right after Alabama and Michigan spent Saturday besetting the committee with a tricky choice for No. 1. That’s because Alabama shocked and throttled then-no. 1 Georgia, 41-24, in the SEC championship game, and Michigan mauled Iowa, 42-3, in the Big Ten championship game. The Crimson Tide had defeated three teams certain to be ranked in the closing top 25 — Georgia, Mississippi and Arkansas — while the Wolverines had beaten two
— Ohio State and Iowa.
“Let’s begin with the game that was played last night,” committee chairman Gary Barta, the athletic director at Iowa, said on ESPN, referring to the SEC title. He said, “Not only did Alabama beat Georgia, but the way they beat them. The complete victory over Georgia, the committee came out of that with a strong consensus that Alabama was number one and Michigan was number two.”
Notably, Cincinnati lived a dream often deemed impossible in a sport long heavy on snobbery from its moneyed kingdoms. The Bearcats became the first team from the Group of Five, the less-wealthy sector
of the 130-team Football Bowl Subdivision, to gain permission for a playoff spot, and they did so by fulfilling the only viable formula for such underlings with their eternally challenged strengths of schedule. They went unbeaten as of their 3520 win Saturday over thenno. 21 Houston in the American Athletic Conference championship game, and they pelted a tiptop Power Five team along the way — in this case Notre Dame, on the road, on Oct. 2.
The Bearcats head into the postseason as the only unbeaten team in the country.
“It’s an historic day. It really is. In the world of sports, this is history,” AAC
Commissioner Mike Aresco said. “This is something probably many, many people never thought they would see.”
Notre Dame proceeded to flatter Cincinnati after that, winning out to finish just outside the playoff. Ohio State (10-2), No. 2 until its 4227 decking at Michigan on Nov. 27, finished No. 6. Big 2 champ Baylor is at No. 7.
Three of the five Power Five conferences — the ACC, the Big 12 and the Pac-12 — did not receive a berth, the most to have gone excluded in the eight years. That should help foment continuing cries for playoff expansion.
The semifinals will boast fresh matchups. Alabama
has not played Cincinnati since November 1990, when the Crimson Tide in Gene Stallings’s first season won, 45-7, over a Bearcats team coached by Tim Murphy, who just went 8-2 in his 28th season at Harvard.
Alabama vs. Cincinnati will present a highbrow bout between Alabama’s renowned institution of future NFL wideouts and Cincinnati’s phenomenal secondary, which includes the Nflbound corner Ahmad “Sauce” Gardner, toward whom teams barely dare to throw.
“We certainly think Cincinnati belongs in the playoffs, and they’re a really good team,” Alabama Coach Nick Saban said on ESPN,
while adding that his receivers did incur a major blow with John Metchie III’S knee injury from Saturday which, Saban said, appears to be “significant.”
Fifth-year Cincinnati coach Luke Fickell, who won a 2014 national championship as defensive coordinator at Ohio State, his alma mater, imagined his players would “be kind of excited to put the shoe on the other foot (as an underdog) from what they’ve had this year,” as a chronic favorite.
Michigan vs. Georgia will present a dominant rugged team (Georgia) trying to recover from a stunning thumping, and an ascendant rugged team (Michigan) trying to sustain a sudden mastery of huge games. It will have seventh-year Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh, who keeps reeling off players’ and coaches’ names as he extols them and says of his team, as on ESPN, “I never have to try to talk them into something.”
And it will have sixth-year Georgia coach Kirby Smart, still trying to climb the Alabama hurdle that has clipped him four times in various galling ways since he left Alabama for Georgia after 2015.