The successful arrival of the College Football Playoff proves that the sky did not fall — as so many said it would

In 1993, an 11-1 Notre Dame team finished second in the polls to a 12-1 Florida State team that the Fighting Irish had defeated in the regular season. Notre Dame fans were furious at being denied a national championship because of the sport’s refusal to beat its champion on the field. The school’s athletic director, Dick Rosenthal, did not share their view.

“(Notre Dame’s) position has been to oppose the playoff because we don’t believe in extending the season,” he said. “It’s a threat to the student-athlete’s academic success.”

Thirty-one years later, guess which school is hosting the first ever College Football Playoff game?

Notre Dame hosts Indiana on Friday night in the first game of the first year of a 12-team postseason tournament. It is nothing short of miraculous that four FBS playoff games are taking place on college campuses this weekend, given decades upon decades of coaches, athletic directors, university presidents, conference commissioners and, of course, bowl executives warning us of all the dire consequences, there was. will this day ever come.

“There would be a very serious academic conflict should our team be fortunate enough to qualify,” Tennessee athletic director Bob Woodruff wrote in a 1971 NCAA News editorial. “It would require special (graduation) schedules for us to be able to work more than one football game during the holiday period from mid-December to the first of January.”

It only took 53 years, but Tennessee must have figured something out. The Vols play a first-round playoff game Saturday at Ohio State. If they win, they will play another in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 1.

College football’s never-ending debate over holding an NFL-style playoff dates back at least to the 1960s, when several prominent coaches began advocating for such a system. One of the earliest was Penn State’s Joe Paterno, who didn’t live to see the Nittany Lions host SMU on Saturday in a first-round game with a temperature expected in the 20s with possible snow.

Their voices remained in the minority among college sports leaders for decades. It took until 1998 just to stage an official national championship game at one of four bowl sites, and then until 2014 to stage a four-team playoff. Anything beyond that remained a bridge too far.

“I have to tell you, I really don’t see an NFL-style playoff coming to college football anytime soon,” then-BCS coordinator Kevin Weiberg said in 2005. He was right.

Academics were one of the main excuses (er, concerns) expressed by university presidents and others. Don’t forget that basketball players have long spent three weeks driving around the country during March Madness, or that the College World Series stretches long after graduation. Football players would surely flee if asked to play an extra game in finals week.

“They’re going to wring a playoff system out of my cold, dead hands,” declared then-Ohio State president Gordon Gee in 2007. Gee, now the president of West Virginia, is still alive.

Another big concern was that a bigger playoff game would ruin college football’s exciting regular season. In a 2008 interview, Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese cited Pitt’s season-ending rout of West Virginia the previous season that knocked the Mountaineers out of the national championship race altogether.

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

On the final day of this regular season, 16.6 million people watched an SEC championship game between two teams, Georgia and Texas, both safe in the playoffs.

As for playing December games on campus, generations of leaders whose schools might get the opportunity to host the biggest home game in their history found countless reasons to say “no thanks.”

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

Well, problem solved: Clemson plays its first-round game in Austin, Texas, which boasts 50,000 hotel rooms. (Also, CFP’s travel agency secured hotel blocks near all the major contenders months ago.)

And oh, the cold weather. Please, no cold weather. Remember, lower-division schools have long played outdoor postseason games in Montana and Minnesota.

“There’s some accounting to be done for stadiums that need to be winterized in the months of December and January and things like that,” Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said in 2021.

No need to panic. Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft said the newly renovated Beaver Stadium is good to go this weekend.

“The heat is rolling,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”

The root cause of all these excuses (er, worries) was the sport’s undying loyalty to their friends who run bowl games. Generations of coaches, player administrators and spectators loved their vacation visits to Pasadena, California, New Orleans and Miami and dared not betray the people of those communities. Which warned in no uncertain terms of the existential threat of an endgame.

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

There were 18 bowl games when McElroy said this. There are 41 today. Six of them will host playoff games starting on December 31.

So what changed? Why, after six decades of struggle, did commissioners and their university presidents finally agree to an event that will see Notre Dame, Penn State, Ohio State and Texas host playoff games in the cold and snow of December? Why are they now okay with the athletes at Indiana, SMU, Clemson and Tennessee spending the last week of their semester practicing for a road game? Or with the four losing schools missing out on a bowl trip?

If money were the only motive, they would have done it long ago — like in the 1990s, when a Swiss marketing firm offered to organize a 16-team playoff that would pay schools $300 million a year, four times what BCS was doing at the time. (This company, ISL, went out of business shortly after amid a mountain of debt.)

The simple answer might just be that college football evolved. Drastic. Freshmen went from being shut out to some of the biggest stars on their team. Recruitment letters gave way to Instagram DMs. The I formation and belly dive made room for shotguns and RPOs.

And gradually, over time—albeit at the speed of a 350-pound offensive lineman—more and more managers became receptive to the idea that maybe just perhaps, it was possible to hold a major playoff without destroying everything we hold sacred.

You heard from a wide spectrum of Playoff judges throughout this column. Here we pay tribute to the late Washington Post columnist William Barry Furlong, who in 1974 predicted the thinking that would eventually prevail, even if it took another 50 years.

“If college football pretends to be part of Americana,” he wrote, “it must acknowledge something of the American spirit. There are deeper currents in the American people than rah-rah and fan pennants. Too deep in the American psyche lies a need to wind things up properly, to have an end to things as well as a beginning. The endgame would correspond to the spirit of the American people.”

Friday night, nearly 78,000 Americans will flock to Notre Dame Stadium for the beginning of this historic event, which will wrap up nicely exactly one month later in Atlanta.

Here’s to predicting that the battle to reach this moment will have been worth the wait.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / Athletics; photo: Sam Hodde / Getty Images)