The successful start of the College Football Playoff proves that the sky has not fallen – as so many have claimed

In 1993, an 11-1 Notre Dame team finished second within the poll, behind a 12-1 Florida State team that had defeated the Fighting Irish within the regular season. Notre Dame fans were indignant that they were denied a national championship since the sport refused to place its champion on the sector. The school's athletic director, Dick Rosenthal, didn’t share her standpoint.

“(Notre Dame's) position was to reject the playoffs because we don't believe in extending the season,” he said. “It is a threat to the student-athlete’s academic success.”

Guess which school will host the first-ever College Football Playoff home game 31 years later?

Notre Dame hosts Indiana on Friday night in the primary game of the primary 12 months of a 12-team postseason tournament. It's nothing in need of a miracle that there are 4 FBS playoff games on college campuses this weekend, considering that coaches, athletic directors, university presidents, conference commissioners and, in fact, bowl managers have been warning us for many years about all of the dire consequences That day will ever come.

“If our team were fortunate enough to qualify, there would be a very serious academic conflict,” Tennessee athletic director Bob Woodruff wrote a 1971 NCAA News editorial. “In order to play more than one football game during the holiday period from mid-December to January 1, special (testing) schedules would be required.”

It only took 53 years, but Tennessee will need to have figured something out. The Vols play a first-round playoff game at Ohio State on Saturday. If they win, they may play again on January 1st in Pasadena, California.

College football's infinite debate over conducting NFL-style playoffs dates back to at the least the Nineteen Sixties, when several distinguished coaches began advocating for such a system. One of the primary was Penn State University's Joe Paterno, who didn't live to see the Nittany Lions host SMU on Saturday in a first-round game with temperatures expected to be within the low 70s and possibly snow.

Their voices remained within the minority amongst college athletic leaders for many years. It took until 1998 for an official national championship game to be held at considered one of the 4 bowl sites, after which until 2014 to carry a four-team playoff. Anything beyond that was a bridge too far.

“I have to tell you, I really don't think there's going to be an NFL-style playoff in college football anytime soon,” then-BCS coordinator Kevin Weiberg said in 2005. He was right.

Academics were considered one of the most important excuses (ahem, concerns) expressed by university presidents and others. Not to say the undeniable fact that basketball players have been commuting across the country for 3 weeks during March Madness or that the College World Series is well beyond graduation. Football players would definitely fail in the event that they needed to play an additional game within the finals week.

“They’re going to rip a playoff system from my cold, dead hands,” then-Ohio State president Gordon Gee said in 2007. Gee, now West Virginia’s president, continues to be very much alive.

Another major concern was that a bigger playoff would smash college football's exciting regular season. In a 2008 interview, Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese referenced Pitt's season-ending upset of West Virginia the previous season, which had knocked the Mountaineers completely out of contention for the national championship.

“If there had been a playoff, who would have seen this game?” he said. “It wouldn’t mean anything. West Virginia would already be in the playoffs.”

On the ultimate day of this regular season, 16.6 million people watched an SEC championship game between two teams, Georgia and Texas, each of which were safely within the playoffs.

When it involves hosting December games on campus, generations of leaders whose schools might get the chance to host the most important home game of their history found countless reasons to say “no thanks.”

For example, in 2019, then-Clemson athletic director Dan Radakovich said of potential home playoff games: “Have you ever tried to get a hotel (on short notice) in Clemson, SC, or Blacksburg, Virginia?”

Well, problem solved: Clemson is playing its first-round game in Austin, Texas, where there are 50,000 hotel rooms. (Plus, CFP's travel agency secured hotel blocks near all of its most important competitors months ago.)

And oh yes, the cold weather. No cold weather please. It doesn't matter that lower-tier schools in Montana and Minnesota have long played outdoor postseason games.

“There needs to be some accounting of stadiums that need to be winterized in the months of December and January, etc.,” Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said in 2021.

No have to panic. Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft said the newly renovated Beaver Stadium could be ready to be used this weekend.

“The heat is rolling,” he said. “Everything will be fine.”

The root reason behind all these excuses (ahem, concerns) was the game's undying loyalty to its bowl game-hosting friends. Generations of coaches, player managers and spectators enjoyed holiday visits to Pasadena, California, New Orleans and Miami and dared not betray the people of those communities. Who unequivocally warned of the existential threat of a playoff.

“Basically,” Liberty Bowl general manager William McElroy Jr. said in 1984, “I think it would put the bowls out of business.”

When McElroy said this, there have been 18 bowl games. Today there are 41. Six of them will host playoff games starting December thirty first.

So what has modified? Why, after six many years of struggle, have commissioners and their universities' presidents finally agreed to an event during which Notre Dame, Penn State, Ohio State and Texas will host playoff games within the cold and snowy December? Why are they now okay with Indiana, SMU, Clemson and Tennessee athletes spending the last week of their semester practicing for a road game? Or since the 4 losing schools miss a bowl trip?

If money had been the one motive, they’d have done this an extended time ago – like within the Nineteen Nineties, when a Swiss marketing firm offered to host a 16-team playoff that might pay schools $300 million a 12 months, in keeping with the BCS corresponds on the time. (That company, ISL, went out of business shortly thereafter amid a mountain of debt.)

The easy answer may be that college football has evolved. Drastic. Freshmen who were ineligible became a few of their teams' biggest stars. Recruitment letters gave option to Instagram DMs. The I formation and belly dive gave option to shotguns and RPOs.

And little by little, as time went on – albeit on the speed of a 350-pound offensive lineman – increasingly more executives became receptive to the concept it would just be possible to carry a much bigger playoff without destroying every little thing, what’s sacred to us.

In this column, you've heard from a wide selection of playoff doomsayers. Here we pay tribute to the late Washington Post columnist William Barry Furlong, who in 1974 predicted the mindset that might ultimately prevail, even when it took one other 50 years.

“If college football claims to be a part of Americana,” he wrote, “it must acknowledge something of the American spirit.” There are deeper currents within the American people than rah-rah and pennant-waving. Because deep within the American psyche is the necessity to finish things properly, to have an end to things and at the identical time have a starting. The playoffs would reflect the spirit of the American people.”

On Friday evening, nearly 78,000 Americans will flock to Notre Dame Stadium for the beginning of this historic event, which can conclude properly exactly a month later in Atlanta.

We assume that the wait until this moment was price it.

The athlete