Blatant Homerism: The pool of potential national champions is shrinking
A consensus has formed among college football’s chattering class that this season’s race for the national championship is wide open.
In some ways, this is true. Practically speaking, with 12 teams qualifying for the College Football Playoff now, the field is objectively bigger than it used to be.
Moreover, one or two teams usually stand out every year among college football’s top contenders, and you don’t see that this season. Texas appears to have emerged as the most popular pick as the preseason No. 1 team, but that likely speaks to the lack of an overwhelming favorite at this point. The Longhorns have more unknowns at this point than your typical team that grabs the top ranking.
Does this national championship race really qualify as wide open, though? Winning a national championship is a two-sided proposition. First, teams have to qualify for the CFP. Second, they have to win three or four games in the postseason.
You can find a large group of squads that fall into the former group. The latter? Not so much.
Ole Miss’ 2024 squad seems like a good example of a non-qualifier that could have won it all. If you gave the Ohio State coaching staff members truth serum, they would probably tell you the Rebels scared them more than any team that actually made the field. The Rebs finished the year ranked fifth overall in ESPN’s Football Power Index and second in SP+. Eight players from the squad got picked in this year’s NFL draft, including five in the first three rounds.
But the Rebels couldn’t navigate their SEC slate. Ole Miss’ key wins included thoroughly dismantling both Georgia and South Carolina. However, they lost to LSU, Kentucky, and Florida. Imagine if instead those three opponents were something like Nebraska, Washington and Rutgers – all teams from the B1G that qualified for bowl games last year.
Now take a look at LSU’s 2025 team. Do you see a resemblance between what the Tigers will put on the field this fall versus last year’s Ole Miss team? LSU will boast arguably the best quarterback in the country in Garrett Nussmeier. He’s throwing to Aaron Anderson, who caught 61 passes for 884 yards and five touchdowns last year, and playing alongside promising sophomore running back Caden Durham. On top of that, head coach Brian Kelly stacked up one of the best groups of transfers in college football this cycle.
That sounds like the kind of team that could do some damage in a 12-team tournament, but the schedule for the Tigers is tricky. Away games versus Clemson and Alabama seem rough, and a trip to Oklahoma to end the season could prove daunting. The Bayou Bengals also have to get past Florida, Texas A&M and South Carolina, although they will face all three in Baton Rouge.
The scheduling gods may knock LSU out of the running for the national championship, in other words.
Conversely, Penn State has the feel of a squad stuck in the zone of “good, but not good enough.”
When the CFP expanded to 12 teams, PSU was widely seen as one of the big winners. Under the four-team system, the Nittany Lions perpetually found themselves with a 10-2 record and sitting on the outside of the B1G title game and CFP. The ‘24 season played out the same way as usual; however, the Nittany Lions got a CFP shot by virtue of the expanded field.
PSU bumped up against a new version of the glass ceiling in the ‘24 postseason. Wins over SMU and Boise State in the CFP definitely count for something. Once the Nittany Lions went up against a team with equal talent in Notre Dame in the semifinals, however, they came up short. It was a novel spin on a familiar story: Penn State put together its customarily strong regular season, but we’re not talking about a program with the goods to win it all.
This year, the Nittany Lions again look like one of the safer bets to make the field of 12. In addition to a pillowy soft slate of non-conference games, PSU hosts Oregon and travels to Iowa and Ohio State. If the Nittany Lions can win one of those three games, they will likely get a CFP bid by avoiding any slip-ups.
At the same time, we’ve seen this movie so often before in Happy Valley. It’s hard to believe PSU suddenly has the depth and star power to beat three or four good teams in a row in the postseason. (Kerry Collins and Ki-Jana Carter aren’t walking through that door.) File teams like Clemson, Notre Dame and Oregon under this heading, too.
Frankly, with the way things are done in college football now, you can’t go wrong picking Ohio State, Georgia or Alabama to win the national championship. Those three programs have won five of the last six titles. Their structural advantages seemingly give them even bigger edges over the rest of the competition in the new format. How many other teams have the depth to survive so many massive games in a compressed time frame?
That doesn’t sound like the parity we were promised by the people who run college football. In the end, I suspect all these changes to the sport’s postseason have amounted to nothing more than reinforcing the status quo.