AUBURN | The first 12-team playoff will conclude a week from today with Notre Dame taking on Ohio State for the national championship.
It’s the best-ever college football postseason despite all the whining and gnashing of teeth we’ve heard from SEC country over the last couple of months.
A select group of coaches and supporters were especially vocal during the first round. They can all sit down and shut up now. The entitlement was nothing but hot air from a conference that was bang average this past season.
Both semifinals were very competitive and came down to key fourth-quarter plays including Ohio State’s Jack Sawyer stripping his former roommate of the ball, scooping it up and and lumbering 83 yards for a game-clinching touchdown.
Mr. Buckeye cut the heart right out of Texas.
The Penn State-Notre Dame semi was a back-and-forth thriller during the second half that ended with a game-winning 41-yard field goal with 7 seconds left.
When you consider what could have been, the playoffs look even brighter.
The four-team college football playoff, which reigned from 2014 to 2023, would have given us Oregon vs. Penn State in one semifinal and Georgia vs. Texas in the other.
This year’s two championship finals teams, Notre Dame and Ohio State, would have been watching from home. They were ranked fifth and sixth respectively in the final playoff rankings.
The old BCS system, which was used from 1998-2013, would have pitted Oregon vs. Georgia for the national championship. Both teams were knocked out in the quarterfinals by a combined 33 points.
Boring.
Can the current system be tweaked to make it even better? Sure.
More home games on college campuses would be a big improvement. It’s what makes college football special and Oregon certainly should have hosted a game in Autzen Stadium.
Not handing top four seeds and byes to schools like Boise State or Arizona State, which were ranked ninth and 12th respectively in the final rankings, would also be an improvement and potentially make those first round games more competitive.
That may happen on its own, however, as NIL and the transfer portal continue to spread out the talent among more schools.
The leaders of college football will be meeting in Atlanta in conjunction with the national championship game to discuss these matters.
They can tweak the format for 2025 with unanimous approval but starting in 2026, the SEC and Big Ten will make most of the calls when it comes to the postseason.
It’ll be interesting to see what changes are coming, but I’ll be much more interested in what happens on the field as the best postseason in college football comes to a conclusion.
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Bruce Pearl talks a lot about the growth his players and teams can make going through adversity.
This week could certainly offer some growing opportunities after All-American Johni Broome went down with an ankle injury Saturday.
The Tigers could be without their best player as they host No. 14 Mississippi State Tuesday night and then travel to Georgia Saturday. MSU is one of the SEC’s most physical teams while UGA has already beaten No. 6 Kentucky and No. 18 Oklahoma at home.
If Broome can’t go, it will be a big opportunity for Chaney Johnson to step into the starting lineup and for Jahki Howard and Ja’Heim Hudson to step up with more production off the bench.
Getting more from Howard and Hudson could be big for Auburn as it gets into the heart of conference play.
I wouldn’t call being ranked No. 1 adversity, but it would put an even bigger target on Auburn, especially on the road. AU could ascend to No. 1 later today for only the second time in program history.
Auburn spent three weeks on top of the AP poll in 2022.
The Tigers are one of three teams off to a 3-0 start in league play, but it hasn’t been easy. Teams are challenging AU physically and you can count on plenty more of that this week.
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In today’s musical journey, we go back 56 years to the release of an album that contained one of the greatest country music songs of all time and helped catapult the artist into international fame. On Jan. 13, 1969, Tammy Wynette released her fourth album, Stand by Your Man, which included the iconic title song. “Stand by Your Man” was released several months before the album and quickly rose up to No. 1 on the U.S. country singles chart. It also became popular on the pop charts, reaching No. 19 on the Billboard 100 and No. 1 on the UK singles chart. It also reached No. 1 in Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands. The song was written by Wynette and producer/songwriter Billy Sherrill, who signed Wynette to Epic Records in 1968. Wynette said the lyrics were written in about 15 minutes as a love song and it wasn’t meant as a political or social commentary. But it was certainly perceived in that regard coming at the same time as the women’s liberation movement. “Stand by Your Man” won Wynette a Grammy Award for Best Country Vocal Performance and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry in 2010. CMT ranked it No. 1 on its list of the Top 100 Country Music Songs.
Virginia Wynette Pugh was born in Itawamba County, Miss., in 1942. Her father, an aspiring musical artist, died of a brain tumor when she was just nine months old. Wynette grew up on her grandparent’s farm where she helped pick cotton and learned to play many of her deceased father’s musical instruments including the piano. She formed a singing trio in high school where she was named Miss Tremont High. She attended cosmetology school and worked as a barmaid before her first big break came performing on the Country Boy Eddie T.V. show on WBRC in Birmingham, Ala. In 1966, she left her absent husband and moved to Nashville with her three children to pursue a career in music. She was turned down by several labels before being signed by Sherrill, who changed her stage name from Wynette Bird to Tammy Wynette. She quickly started rolling out the hits in 1967 with “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad,” which hit No. 3 on the country chart, and two No. 1’s in “My Elusive Dream” and “I Don’t Want to Play House.” Over a three-decade career, Wynette produced 43 albums plus nine more with her husband of six years, George Jones, had 39 top 10 country hits and 20 that hit No. 1. She also had several movie and T.V. roles including that of Tilly Hill in King of the Hill from 1997-98. She won two Grammys and two Academy of Country Music awards, and was inducted into the Country Music and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fames. Due to several health issues, Wynette became addicted to pain killers during a good portion of the 1980’s and 1990’s. She died in her sleep at the age of 55 in 1998 due to a blood clot in her lung.
