Lousy game AND lousy weather??

Yesterday, we spent a whole bunch of time talking about what happened in Los Angeles at SoFi Stadium and the National Championship Game as Georgia had a walkthrough against TCU for the National Championship. I punched up the Cover 3 podcast, it was actually this morning when I punched it up from the postgame and I hear no Chip. I hear no Chip, I hear no Danny Cannell, I have Tom Fornelli and Bud Elliott, two wonderful human beings, but Chip was... You got me eventually. Yes, I couldn't stay that long, but we did get you eventually. I understand.

Look, I'm a regular listener to the Cover 3 podcast and there's Chip Patterson who is back from the West Coast. I don't know if TCU stay there. Real quick, let's just address the game first. Did you see that coming? I mean, that was next level. When you and I were texting earlier today, it's bad to even use it as an example of what might come in the future because I think it was just weird. It's sort of like comparing anything in college basketball to Zion Williamson. We may never see that again, comparing modern golfers to Tiger Woods. The chances are we are never going to see that again. But what did we watch?

Two things happened all at once. Number one, this Georgia team peaked because this Georgia team lost 15 players to the NFL draft off of last year's team. This Georgia team had four freshmen on the field on defense, true freshmen, at the end of that Ohio State game. This Georgia team's four out of the top six leading tacklers against TCU are underclassmen that'll be back for next season. On the offensive side of the ball, you saw Branson Robinson at the end of the game with his hard running. You've got some underclassmen on the offensive line as well. This Georgia team has been working to this point.

It's one of the reasons why Kirby Smart thinks that replacing all those players made winning this title easier than the effort is going to be to try to keep the team engaged, keep the team from getting entitled going into next season. So number one, a truly elite team from a truly elite program peaked in this moment. And number two, TCU played poorly. That's the thing is like Max Duggan has played enough football that we've seen the worst of Max Duggan.

We've seen the floor and we've seen his ceiling. We've seen like when he was not named the starting quarterback at the beginning of the season with the eventual Heisman Trophy finalist. When he was named the starting quarterback for TCU at the beginning of the season, no one thought it was an outrage. He had a bad game.

The offense was entirely overwhelmed. But the reason I'm don't want to single out Duggan specifically, but do you remember the I believe it was the second interception late in the first half. He had Quentin Johnston wide open down the field. If he delivers the ball and he's not off of his step and off balance, then that's a touchdown that I think at the time would have made the score like 24 to 14 instead of us hitting this moment where it was 10 to seven. And he had had the 60 yard pass to Darius Davis, they finish it up with the Max Duggan touchdown run.

You're saying okay, 10 to seven. Maybe this is where we see this get a game because literally every single snap that we had seen to that point that touchdown drive said Georgia is going to turn this into a blowout. But what happened after that point was four more first half touchdowns for Georgia and two interceptions from Max Duggan. They couldn't take care of the ball.

They were making mistakes. It is a credit to Georgia. But the two things that happened at once was a truly elite team from a truly elite program peaking, playing one of its best games of the entire season, while a TCU team that had overperformed its talent also had one of its worst performances of the entire season. And that's what leads to the biggest blowout in a title game history. Well, TCU had been turning the ball over a lot lately anyway, so they just couldn't get rid of that. I mean, they were fortunate that Michigan turned it over to them. I'm not saying that Michigan was better than TCU.

They might have been. But when you give away two pick sixes and then you lose by what they was by six. I mean, it's a game that Michigan is probably thinking, boy, if we hadn't just handed them 14 points, not to mention the points that you don't get, then Michigan probably would have gotten beat by 30 by Georgia.

Would Michigan kept it within 30? Have you heard Kirby Smart's pregame speech? I did. I'm torn on that. I like it. I mean, I don't hate it, but I'm torn. I'm torn by what that means. What do you mean?

I just I think all of that stuff. So it's Saba. It's Sabiness because Saba is like the original Nick Saban in the Alabama locker room before the LSU game, as it was like recorded unbeknownst to him was, you know, you go out there and you make their blank quit. Right. You make them blank and quit.

You eliminate their will to compete. Like that is very much the DNA of Kirby's very NSFW game speech. But his his message of this is what you did all the work for Kirby's smoke at length after the game about the work that the scout team did this.

And I don't think he was just blowing smoke. Like he was really saying that, you know, we have not faced a defense because the story to me was Georgia's offense moving the ball with no resistance, zero. Georgia's defense did exactly what Georgia's defense was expected to do. That game got lopsided because Stetson Bennett and Georgia's offense were in total control of the game. And Kirby said like the and imagine like how gifted and talented the scout team must be in a place like Georgia.

Georgia. They had not faced a defense like that 335 stack that T.C.U. runs all season. And they put in so much work to go out there. He said those guys made our offense better.

Everything that Stetson Bennett had in terms of him seeing the field seems like he was one step ahead the entire game. They put it back in and they give a credit to what they did. And in the speech, he goes, all you did all week.

This is when you go and you make them pay right now. And you and I were talking like I think that favorites win often because of the preparation process. They get to this point in the season because they are very good at taking coaching and putting it into practice.

And that is one of the best in the country in terms of a staff and a roster that have all been all the way bought in on what it takes to win at the highest level. Here's why the the speech, which was I found it, I laughed. So you can find it like, you know, football guy talk. It is football guy talk. But I do wonder, I'm sure Kirby Smart isn't the only coach that does this. So my I'm not saying it's not it. I have no problem with it.

My overall position is that these things only have it's like bulletin board material, right? They only have positive impact when they do. And we ignore them when they don't. So in this case, they won the game. And last year, of course, they won the game. But they have lost big games before. Had Kirby Smart just like forget to give a pregame speech in those games? Did he not give a pregame speech in the SEC championship game last year?

Well, I forget this. I also need to this is what my new offseason research program because Kirby Smart also came out after the game, you know, talking about all the doubters and the haters. And everybody thought that after they lost all this NFL talent, they were going to go seven and five or six and six who said most of the players are on top of this. Like, players have got it in their mind to which I need to know this very well staffed Georgia operation. Do they have a bot farm? And for those who are listening and might not be aware of this, a bot farm would be a lot of automatically running programs that are just feeding tweets into the atmosphere. Georgia, I'm not saying they did or did not but it is within their powers given their resources to establish a bot farm to tweet at all of the players at least twice a week to tell them how they're no good. And honestly, with all the players they have coming back, they might want to invest in a bot farm and just to be able to make sure that they have an edge, right, but multiple players on that roster really believed it.

I mean, they might just search Twitter for any hating tweet and just throw them on the screen during meetings, anything that they can do. So you know, the motivation might not have been needed in the pregame speech, the motivation might have already been taken care of by the bot farm that had gotten all the losers and the haters to be able to create this negativity for a program that was never ranked lower than third in the country, not in the SEC, in the country, wire to wire top three team. Agreed, we did not put Ohio State with the Alabama-Ohio State dichotomy. Like we had gone into this season with Bryce Young and CJ Shroud and Alabama and Ohio State and we downgraded Georgia to third.

Right, all the way to third country. Maybe that is disrespect though. Maybe third is disrespect. To your point about Georgia losing some big games, that is Chris Smith was a senior defensive back on the team this year, spent a lot of time with him after the game. And that's the thing that I do think is cool is for the older players or even like the Kobe Dean was at the game and like the players that have been a part of this rise know that this is very, very special. That winning the first title in 40 years was very special. That before that title, they really only had like one and a half national championships.

Like we give them 1980, you can argue about the other one that the school may or may not claim. And now they've doubled that number in just two years. And this is very, very different new territory for a program that in the sleeping giant power rankings may not have been the sleepiest, but certainly the ceiling of its giantness has always been there. Chip Patterson, as always on Wednesdays here, Cover 3 Podcast, CBSSports.com.

Here's the thing about, I always push back on the prisoner of the moment hot take. But we talked to Roddy Jones from ESPN on Monday. And Roddy pointed out that everything is set for Georgia to be a better version of Alabama because the recruiting base in the state of Georgia is what it is, which is one of the best in the United States. And they're the only game in the state because Georgia Tech doesn't really compete. Alabama's got competition within the state from Auburn. And Alabama doesn't have the natural, not that Alabama's recruiting base isn't the entire country, but it's a little easier when basically 80% of your state grows up, go dogs. So it's just a natural fit. Is it very possible that we are looking at, I understand they won two national championships, but going forward, the lead dog, if you will? Yeah. What that mean? That's something that is 100% underway.

I don't understand how that is even like a major debate. It's very likely they will go into their SEC finale in the third weekend of November with a 10-0 record. Oh, sure. We've seen the schedule. The schedule is... And they had to take Oklahoma off the schedule.

I know. The SEC made them do that. Very different schedule. Even given where Oklahoma is, 6 and 17 this year, I still think that they treat them as such, but that would be 10-0 and having won 39 out of the last 40 games and haven't lost a regular season game dating back to the COVID 2020 season when they lost to Florida. Let me ask you real quick about the Oklahoma game that they had to take off the schedule.

If you're Greg Sankey, first of all, two questions about this. The first is Oklahoma was the admitted to the SEC, not this summer, last summer. The game wasn't scheduled after that. The game was already on the books to be scheduled. So I understand that the return game falls during the window when they were then going to be part of the league.

Right. Don't you understand that Georgia's non-conference schedule now is garbage and that it's not going to matter, but you have a defending national champion and I realize, I guess he couldn't see it then. Maybe Greg Sankey also disrespected Georgia, but now their non-conference schedule is trash. And why wouldn't you let him play Oklahoma? You're going to win the game because Oklahoma is not that good. I don't get it.

I don't get it either. I mean, you know, that's that honestly has a little bit more than Michigan backing out of UCLA on this year's non-conference schedule, which is why Michigan's non-conference schedule was so bad. So you still make the college football playoff. You can still make the college football playoff. It seems to just be a scheduling practice. And I don't pretend to understand the keys to scheduling practice. You know, my feeling on this, this is the expanded playoff.

Isn't going to be any incentive for teams to schedule better. None. I ran the chip. Do you want to hear? We're going to do that when we come back. I want, I want to take a quick break, but I interrupted you in a, in mid thought.

Do you want to finish that? Even remember that thought, just the idea that of course there's a chance of a changing of the guard because while only one to right now, you're very much going to be in the mix for three, three is when you start to talk about dynasty. And what I would like to bring to the table is consideration that when we're looking at Kirby smart as an individual and sort of like the, you know, power ranking all the coaches in this game, he was a very important part of four Alabama national championships. Not that should, I'm not going to Brady Belicheck this thing, but I'm saying that if we're going to do the count the rings that yeah, Kirby only has two as a head coach, which automatically is rarefied air, but he's also got four as a very, very integral part of those Alabama national championships. Now, one other note on what made this one, this special Kirby says, I won four national championships at Alabama. Only one of them was an undefeated season.

And Georgia just finished off a 15 and O national championship season, one for the books for sure. All right. We're going to get into chip politics because college football expands playoff expansion is coming. And I, people keep telling me that upsets are going to be part of our future. I don't think so.

Uh, all right. Two back to college football and the notion that the college football playoff is going to be awesome. I think based on sheer numbers, we are likely to have some really good games. We had two outstanding national semifinals in this college football playoff, but I think by and large, obviously not to the extreme we saw Monday night.

I think by and large, we're going to see a lot of that in a 12 team playoff and heaven forbid it gets bigger than that. What do the chip olytics say chip Patterson in nine years of the college football playoff, there have been 27 games that were either a semifinal or a national championship. And according to the chip olytics, 10 have been competitive. Uh, there were years where 27 games 10 competitive.

Yes. 37% for those keeping track at home. Uh, you would have some years like in 2015 and 2016 where there were zero competitive semifinals, but the title game, both Alabama and Clemson different winners was incredibly competitive. Sometimes you would get only one semifinal being good, like in 2017, uh, Georgia, Oklahoma, Rose bowl.

And then also you get a title game. So therefore you had two out of the three in 2018, zero competitive in 2020, zero competitive 2021. I might be stretching, but I believe that Georgia, Alabama, the rematch though, it was a 15 point deficit at the end.

That was a competitive game till Stetson Bennett had that final lead extending touchdown right near the end. So again, 27 games, 10 have been competitive, which is a higher clip than you get in terms of big games and producing on a regular season Saturday. Cause on a regular season Saturday, if you were still getting them at that clip, then you'd get about nine to 10 really good games a Saturday.

And the truth is we're probably a little bit below that on an average Saturday. So when I look at the 12 team format, I think that in the 11 games of a 12 team format, four of them are going to be really, really good games. You can hope they might be the title game, but in reality it's probably only going to be, uh, you know, one or two early round games and then semifinal and title or both semifinals, but not the title, uh, four games in a 12 team format.

And since I do think this is a real thing, uh, in the 16 team format, I would, which will have 15 games to be able to get there. I think you'll have five and a half or between five and six games that are competitive, which is to say, yes, we are going to have more blowouts, but we are also going to have more good games. And while the blowouts have been a bummer because you clear out the entire window and everyone watches and then it's a blowout, the playoff has delivered about as many competitive games, um, you know, in terms of rate as a regular college football Saturday.

I want to, I want to take this one step further and just add another element. If you go back to the bowl championship series, when we had one title game and all the others, while bigger games for more money were basically exhibitions, we had a lot more teams, a lot of different teams involved in the mix. As we got to the college football playoff, that number dwindled. The number of teams who played for the championship in the, how was eight years of the college and it's nine years of the college football playoff, right?

Nine seasons of the college. The number of teams has essentially shrunk from where we were. Remember when more teams was going to give more opportunity, it actually worked out to be less.

Now I don't think it's going to get, I don't think it's going to shrink even more because I don't know that it can, but I don't think this is going to give more teams a chance to win than we have now. Unless, and this is what I've been saying about college football for a long time, unless some of the blue bloods actually get back to being blue bloods, like a Florida state, I'm not even saying Miami, but like a Southern Cal. Maybe a Penn State gets back into it. I don't know if Penn State's a proper blue blood.

How about the University of Florida? I think Michigan's success over the last two seasons is the path. I think Michigan's success over the last two seasons and the presence of Cincinnati and TCU honestly show that you didn't even need to expand.

They just like let the sport play out, like let cycles happen. There is on one hand the argument that you could pull up a top 25 poll from 1992, go down it and realize you've got 19 of the same top 25 teams that are going to be in the preseason poll this year, that the sport largely hasn't changed in terms of the teams that are good and the ones that are really invested in trying to win at the highest level of football. But we also know that football is cyclical and that while Tennessee can be on top of the sport, they can also fall off for a little bit. While Florida state can be on top of the sport, it can also fall off for a little bit, leaving room for some teams to move up. You did not need to expand the playoff in order to give more teams a shot at making the playoff.

You just needed to let the playoff continue to run as it is. But as it stands, I heard a lot of, I heard far more of this like 16 talk than I thought. Athletic director Gene Smith from Ohio State, I thought he was just throwing it out there. It was like, you can't deny the 16 talk. It's there.

I was like, what? Bro, we just landed on this 12 team format. But I'm digging into it and it's like, yeah, actually they've only agreed to the 12 team format for two years.

Cause they want it. They want more teams because they, I think they do want probably two rounds. I think they want two rounds of home field and I'm on board with that. College football is better on home, on campuses.

I understand that there are logistical things about it that we can't get around. But the sport is better when played on campus. No offense to the college football, national championship or the semi-finals.

I get the spectacle of all of those things. But the truth is, is that the game is better when you've got the pageantry of being on campus. How many teams right now would you put in the absolute upper crust of the sport of college football?

Three. Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State? Ohio State, yeah.

Okay. The absolute upper crust talent acquisition combined with on-field success because there are programs that are recruiting at a high level, but not turning in that on-field success. Hey Jimbo. You know, programs that are not recruiting at a high level, but then turning in high levels of on-field success.

Hello TCU. But the ones that are doing them both are Georgia, Alabama and Ohio State. Give me the next tier. Just sort of overall or more just like looking ahead to the immediate future. You decide how you want to comprise tier two of that. LSU in one corner, Michigan, Penn State in another corner, Clemson, Florida State, USC.

Okay. So we have now got it to nine teams and some of that is a little bit of wishful thinking, right? Florida State is trying to call a shot because they have things moving in the right direction on every single front. They look like they're going to be very, very good next year. And we're dealing with Florida State and expectations.

I understand that's going to give everybody a little bit of pause, but yeah, it's something real that's happening there. Can we throw Notre Dame in there? Yes, yes, yes, yes. So that's 10, right? Can we get Texas and maybe, I don't know about Oklahoma, can we get Texas and Oklahoma in that group? You can get Texas and Oregon up there. Now we have, there's a lot of hope, but we have got it all the way to 12. If we had that number and that number was played out in the current system, if those dozen schools played at a high level all the time, we would never, well, we would have always had it because greed and we can't eliminate the desire for all of these people to line their own pockets because that's really what it's about.

But we wouldn't really need, it wouldn't be a clamoring from fans because we would see different teams in there. Like the college basketball tournament doesn't have the same teams year after year after year after year because it's, I mean, it's... It is the same teams cutting the nets down. In college basketball? Largely.

Is it really? Kentucky hasn't won since when? Duke hasn't won since when? North Carolina's got a couple, Villanova had two, but Villanova looks like they don't look like they're going to win anytime soon. The list of championship winners and first time championship winners since 2000 is small. Right, first time winners, but it's not every year where we know, like you can't go into the start of the season and know who three of the four final four teams are going to be.

Sure, right, right, right. And this year in college football, we got lucky we only had two of them. We got lucky only to have two and Alabama nearly talked their way into being part of it again. And I'm not even arguing whether or not Alabama was one of the four best teams in the country by the end of the season.

They might very well have been. But what you did over the course of your season has to matter. Right.

And they lost twice. Right. So I'm just saying we pretty much know who's going to be in the final four football for kind of at the beginning of the season. We will see about the same amount of competitive games. But the thing that fans will like better is when those quarterfinals are thrilling between teams that are not going to win the national championship, right? Because those quarter that quarterfinal game would have been USC and Tulane and USC blowing a 15 point lead in the final like seconds of that game against Tulane. If it was a playoff game, then even though we would be sending Tulane on to an obvious splattering situation.

Shout out to my guy, Josh Pate, who was splattering. Like we would send Tulane on to lose against Georgia in the semifinals. But that idea of that game being a playoff win matters more. Penn State beats Utah in the Rose Bowl. Matt, like you want to talk about a team that keep your eye on next year. Next year is the like James Franklin expectations here. Okay, good.

86 million. Let's see what you got here next year. Everything's lining up for him. But I those games when those games are really, really good. The Ohio State Utah Rose Bowl last year, like neither of those teams probably wins the national championship. We might end up with Georgia and Alabama again. But if that's a quarterfinal matchup, then that's some fun stuff right there. So I'm looking forward to a round of 16 and opening round game in Athens between Georgia and Bowling Green when we get to 16. Buddy, if the Mac is one of the six producers, one of the six highest ranked conference champions, things have gone horribly. You don't think when we get to 16 that we're going to have all the conferences represented?

Absolutely not. I hope so. I hope you're right.

And I also I also believe that you got to ditch this seeding idea with you on that. Because like if you do 16, then we can at least like stack them up one through 16 and not have the like Clemson and Utah holding down the three and the four seed as they would have like when they put the this is what the college football playoff would have looked like. I wasn't anticipating those first round games and be like, Oh, that's gonna be great.

I was looking at the buys and I was like, how did they get a three line based on where they stand against everybody else in a full ranking? So yeah, lots of it's it's the college football offseason. We didn't even get to talk about what to do with early signing day.

Greg Sankey told anybody who had a recorder or a microphone how his coaches are feeling crushed. We got to get the early signing period moved. So we need to move that to the summer anyway.

That's my so that's my suggestion. Move on to the summer. So what I've heard is the college coaches are worried about ticking off the high school coaches. Because if they have the signing day in the summer, the high school coaches are worried that players will opt out of their senior year of high school.

Okay. Which is might be fair. And the compromise might be that you move it up to the week after Thanksgiving, the Wednesday of conference championship week, because if you're not playing in a conference championship game, you're done.

And you move it up so that coaches aren't doing transfer portal bowl prep, like all you know, all those other things all at once all during the holidays and not spending time with their families. I just wonder how many kids who I think love playing high school football. I just wonder how many of them are going to not care because they've already secured their college. Like I just think we I think we always plan for the worst of people.

And I think more often than not, we'd be surprised. Oh, panicky and paranoid. Yeah.

I like just in their DNA. So that's, that's the conversation as I understand it is that the coaches don't have an answer. There's a lot of different options.

One is in the summer, one is move it up in December, right after Thanksgiving, and another is just to get rid of it. And just, you know, get back to February, the pay the high school players. That's the way to get the way to get into play.

Pay him to play their senior year of high school. Chip Patterson, you're the best man. Sounds good. Y'all be well. All right. Chip Patterson here every Wednesday as well.