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Time to root for College Football Playoff chaos if you want change to system

Georgia. Pittsburgh. Texas. Northwestern. And UCF (or if you're really feeling devilish, root also for Memphis; we don't know what that would do to everything, but it would be fun).
Courtesy USA Today Sports

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Last weekend, en route to Texas for work, Bill Hancock and his wife Nicki detoured via the back roads of Kansas during a sudden snowstorm. True to his whimsical personality, the executive director of the College Football Playoff chronicled the 10-hour journey on Facebook, complete with photos and video and a chance meeting at a store in Cottonwood Falls with Edith and Maria, who’d never driven in snow before – so they fell in behind the Hancocks.

“We’ve got us a convoy,” he wrote, and he made it all sound like tremendous fun.

Hancock is happy now to be in Grapevine, Texas, where the weekend forecast is for blue skies and temperatures in the 70s. But we called Hancock to ask a more important question. He likes to say seasons are like snowflakes, because no two are ever alike.

In this last weekend before the playoff is unveiled, could college football encounter a blizzard?

The season so far has been a mostly orderly affair – almost boring in its symmetry – which is why the field seems all but set. After a 12-0 season, Notre Dame is in the four-team bracket. With wins in the SEC and ACC championship games, respectively, Alabama and Clemson will be in. If both Oklahoma and Ohio State win, we’ll have a debate – but one of those blueblood programs will slide into the No. 4 spot.

Either the Big Ten or Big 12 will howl. The Pac-12 will count its volleyball national titles. But we’ll have a decent field for the latest Alabama Invitational. And given how the season has mostly played out so far, that’s probably how it will all go down.

But what if instead they all went down? How much fun would it be?

What if …

-- Georgia upsets Alabama.

-- Pittsburgh pops Clemson.

-- Texas outscores Oklahoma (again).

-- Northwestern slogs past the Buckeyes.

What if, in all its glory, a sudden storm disrupts everything we think we know about this season in college football?

Wouldn’t it be, well, fun?

And more important: Would it prompt change?

Let’s add one more to the what-ifs: What if Central Florida, playing without injured quarterback McKenzie Milton, not only beats but blasts Memphis for the American Athletic Conference championship? (We know, the Knights won by a point during the regular season, with Milton. But go with us for a moment.)

If all of that happens, what then?

“I think the fans of the losing teams would be heartbroken,” Hancock says. “Fans of the teams that won would be thrilled. And everybody would just be watching to see what the committee would do.”

Well, yes. Exactly. Who’s in? Hancock won’t go there, and to be fair, if we’re not really sure how the bracket would shake out, neither is he. No one really can be.

And obviously, that ultimate doomsday scenario is about as likely to happen in this last weekend as someone allowing the bottomless bacon tray to be removed from the selection committee’s boardroom suite in the Gaylord Texan hotel. But if it happened – not even all of it, but some – there’s at least a shot that chaos would lead to change.

The popular notion is that it might only take Georgia upsetting Alabama to cause serious contemplation of an expanded bracket, and that might be correct. If the Crimson Tide got into the playoff, anyway – and though the selection committee’s decision would not be as simple or easy as some keep saying, no one would be surprised – you’d have half the field from the SEC for the second year in a row, rendering conference championships almost meaningless in terms of winning a national championship.

With Notre Dame safely in the bracket (and Notre Dame is safely in the bracket, y’all, regardless of anything and everything else), having both Georgia and Alabama in, too, would leave out three Power Five conferences. As they watched their prized creation from the sidelines, do you think those commissioners – or as important, their school presidents – might wonder whether eight would be great?

“Right now we feel like we’ve hit the right balance, knowing there’s always going to be tension around who is in and who was left out,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said Thursday on Dan Patrick’s show.

But of course Sankey is satisfied. If you want instant change, see what happens when the SEC gets left out. We’d have an eight-team playoff not two years later, but two weeks later. But there will be grumbling, even if only privately, if three Power Five leagues are left out. And we might be at least a little bit closer to something different.

The scenario that might actually prompt change comes if Alabama beats Georgia convincingly while Oklahoma and Ohio State both lose. If UCF wins in that scenario, do the Knights get in?

Or what if the Knights won and still got left out? If the committee instead gave the No. 4 spot to Georgia for an unappetizing rematch, or slotted Oklahoma, Ohio State or Michigan (or even three-loss Big 12 champion Texas, with two wins against Oklahoma) into the Playoff over the undefeated Knights?

Cue the Congressional hearings.

Sadly, it’s all so unlikely. This season has largely unfolded according to expectations, with favorites winning week after week. At least right now, there feels like a definite stratification: Alabama and maybe Clemson at the top, a tier filled with other good but flawed teams below that, then everybody else.

But we got a taste of zany last week. Ohio State blasted Michigan. And it was off the playoff marquee, but maybe, if we’re lucky, that delicious seven-overtime score-fest in College Station was not an earthquake but a foreshock. Maybe chaos is coming.

If you want change – an expanded playoff? actual access for the Group of Five? Alabama not getting in by birthright? – you should cheer for as much disruption as possible. Your scorecard:

Georgia. Pittsburgh. Texas. Northwestern. And UCF (or if you’re really feeling devilish, root also for Memphis; we don’t know what that would do to everything, but it would be fun).

The forecast this weekend is for the favorites. But as we watch this season’s snowflake crystallize, we can hope for a perfect storm.

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