Through the first 11 years of the College Football Playoff, the No. 1 seed won the national championship four times. Only one team won back-to-back titles. And last year’s semifinals featured no team seeded higher than fifth.
The new era has rarely been predictable, but often stale, regularly headlined by the likes of Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia and Clemson. The creation of the playoff came with the promise of possibility, but invitations to teams like Cincinnati (2021) and TCU (2022) were outliers.
Now, college football resembles college basketball, featuring a final four with two teams that have never won a national title (Oregon and Indiana) — including the FBS program with the most all-time losses (Indiana) — one team with a championship from the Eisenhower era (Ole Miss), plus another program (Miami) nearly a quarter century removed from the national title picture.
Last year, the semifinals included four of the seven winningest programs in FBS history. This year, none of the participants rank among the top 30, buoyed by the power of NIL and the transfer portal. Each team is led by a quarterback who began his career at another college and a head coach who started the decade on another campus.
