156 Years Later and ‘They’ Still Don’t Get It

Both those years, Nebraska won the national championship, outright over Penn State in 1994 and shared with Michigan in 1997. To this day, that 11-year old boy still wishes we could have seen those epic matchups in the national championship game. That Penn State offense against the Black Shirts. That great Michigan defense matched up against QB Scott Frost and RB Lawrence Phillips. Sadly, “they” didn’t have the common sense to make that happen.

That 11-year old boy was of course me. Today I am going to make another attempt to share my common sense ideas to improve the ways “they” determine a national champion. Thankfully we do have an actual playoff, so things are absolutely better. After all, Notre Dame might have been robbed at a shot at a national championship this season but they were 10-2. I don’t really feel sorry for them because they could have done something about it—beat Miami (10-2) and Texas A&M (11-1). What could that 1994 Penn State team have done differently? Some say had Joe Paterno not called off the dogs against Indiana, they probably would have fared better with the polls, but they still won every single one of their games.

As I started writing this article, my idea if I was the currently non-existent commissioner of college football would be to expand to 24 teams with 10 automatic bids for the highest ranked champion from every conference plus 14 at-large bids to the highest-ranked remaining teams.

Coach Neuheisel’s Idea

Then I heard an even better idea from the man who should be the commissioner of college football, once “they” come to their senses. That man is Rick Neuheisel, and his idea was that the Group of 5 have their own tournament to crown their own national champion. That makes sense but here comes the genius part. The Group of 5 champion moves on to the big table and the 12-team College Football Playoff as the No. 8 seed.

In the next of this two-part series, I’ll share my ideas on how “they” can roll out Neuheisel’s plan.