For college football fans who want a national sport, with life and breath and diversity beyond two all-powerful conferences, Texas Christian University has saved your season. The Horned Frogs lost their bid to go unbeaten Saturday, but they did enough in defeat to hold on to a College Football Playoff bid amid a field crowded with Big Ten and Southeastern Conference behemoths.
TCU (12–1) is the No. 3 seed. The rest of the four-team bracket consists of blueblood powers from the two revenue-inhaling leagues: No. 2 Michigan (13–0) and No. 4 Ohio State (11–1) from the Big Ten, and No. 1 Georgia (13–0) from the SEC. Just outside the top four are No. 5 Alabama (10–2) and No. 6 Tennessee (10–2) of the SEC. The other school that was in the mix into the final weekend was USC, currently of the Pac-12 but ticketed for the Big Ten in 2024.
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For TCU, a school with an enrollment of about 12,000, making the field validates the vision needed to navigate its nomadic course of the past quarter century. The Horned Frogs are in their fourth league since the demise of the Southwest Conference in the mid-1990s, wandering from the WAC to Conference USA to the Mountain West before finally catching on with the Big 12. This is a triumph of persistence and ambition.
It’s also a big moment for the Big 12, which itself is losing two teams to the SEC (Oklahoma and Texas) in the coming years and hasn’t had a CFP team since 2019. The league’s last two championship games have been riveting dramas that came down to goal-line stands at the opposite ends of AT&T Stadium—Baylor’s stopping Oklahoma State at one end last year, and Kansas State’s stopping TCU at the other Saturday. (The most important thing to come out of those two classics: The league can stage riveting, high-level championship games that have nothing to do with the exiting Sooners and Longhorns.)
The Playoff will get bigger and better in ’24, expanding to 12 teams and giving more leagues a chance to be part of the national championship chase. But it will also mean more participation from the SEC and Big Ten, which will gobble up multiple bids. For now, TCU is the firewall against total domination by those two conferences.
These particular Horned Frogs also would qualify as the most unlikely CFP team in the event’s nine-year history. They are only the second team to make the field after having a losing season the year before, going 5–7 in 2021. (The other was Michigan last year, but the Wolverines played only six games in a ’20 pandemic-plagued season.)
And it was an ugly 5–7. The Frogs’ average losing margin in those seven defeats was 19.3 points. They didn’t look like a team that was just a few small fixes away from turning everything around, which is why TCU was picked to finish seventh in the Big 12. But then coach Sonny Dykes reenergized the program in his first season in Fort Worth, and quarterback Max Duggan became an unlikely superstar in his fourth campaign.
The rest of this Playoff field could pretty much be seen coming from August. Ohio State began the season ranked No. 2 and never left the AP top five, although the Buckeyes all but begged the selection committee to dismiss them from contention with their memorable flop at home against Michigan on Nov. 26. But with some help afterward from South Carolina (which upset Clemson) and Utah (which took down USC), the backdoor path to make a fifth Playoff was cleared for Ohio State. (The only schools that have reached more are Alabama and Clemson.)
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Michigan moved into the top five after the first week of the season and never left, powering through an easy early schedule in a succession of authoritative victories. The Wolverines have had only one scare all season, at home against Illinois on Nov. 19, in which they needed a field goal in the final seconds for a two-point victory. But in hindsight, even a loss there would have been survivable given what followed—the detonation of Ohio State and a three-touchdown victory against Purdue in the Big Ten championship. Michigan is back for a second straight Playoff appearance and hoping to be more competitive than last year, when it was blown out by Georgia in the semifinals.
The Bulldogs, the reigning national champion, have been the most obvious Playoff team all season—literally from the start. They scored on their first possession of the season against Oregon, en route to a 49–3 blowout, and had exactly one ticklish situation, rallying in the fourth quarter to win at Missouri in October. Everything else has been a tour de force.
This is the sixth time the reigning champion has earned a berth the following season, but none of them has won it all. We haven’t had a back-to-back national champion since Alabama in 2011–12, at the tail end of the BCS era.
Georgia certainly looks equipped to change that, but so did Clemson in 2019, Alabama in ’18, and so on. Fact is, the defending champions have lost by 15 or more points in their last four Playoff appearances: Alabama lost 33–18 in the title game last season; Clemson lost 42–25 to LSU in ’19; Alabama was routed 44–16 by Clemson the year before that; and Clemson beat Bama 24–6 in the ’17 semifinals.
For the Big Ten, this is the first time it has two teams in the field. Boxing out the SEC for the final spot had to be satisfying for commissioner Kevin Warren & Co., after seeing the SEC earn two bids in two of the previous five seasons. While it’s unsatisfying to have a team staggering into the semifinal off a 22-point home loss and not having to risk anything in a conference championship game, there really wasn’t much of an alternative at No. 4 other than to Ohio State after USC flopped.
This was the fourth time the Buckeyes have stirred some controversy (or at least dissatisfaction) on their way to a Playoff bid. In the pandemic season of 2020, Ohio State received a Big Ten waiver to play in the league championship game even though it had not competed in the minimum number of games the league set to be eligible for it. In ’16, the Buckeyes did not win their division or conference, but got the nod over a Penn State team that beat Ohio State head-to-head. And, in ’14, Ohio State vaulted from sixth to fourth in the final standings after smashing Wisconsin in the Big Ten title game behind third-string quarterback Cardale Jones—an inclusion that was validated when the Buckeyes won the whole thing. The top-four team that Ohio State bypassed to get in that year? TCU, which won its last game 55–3 and was still dropped. The Horned Frogs faithful never got over that snubbing until, maybe, now.
The program that lost a Playoff bid after a 52-point victory has progressed to the point that it got a Playoff bid after a loss. And saved the sport from total Big Ten–SEC domination in the process.
