I bought a new television that arrived the same day the 2014 college football season started. That’s how excited I was.
From week one through Championship Saturday in December, the drama around the playoff built and built, as the new car smell never wore off.
The season started with one of the best opening weekends ever, which commenced at 6 p.m. on Thursday before Labor Day when Texas A&M played at South Carolina to christen the SEC Network. Remember Kenny Hill? The Aggies QB threw for 500 yards and was compared to Johnny Manziel, before they lost five games and he transferred at the end of the season.
That opening weekend included two games at the Georgia Dome, featuring Ole Miss and Alabama. Those two teams would play a big role in 2014. The opening weekend also featured far more interesting games than past years, including Ohio State at Navy and LSU vs Wisconsin, because we all foolishly believed the strength of non-conference schedules would be more valued in the playoff era.
The headliner on that first Saturday was a classic game between defending champion Florida State and Oklahoma State at Cowboys Stadium. The game was capped off by Jameis Winston’s electrifying touchdown run that has been in video packages for years now.
The 2014 college football season had a different feel to it because it felt like so many more games mattered. One loss didn’t end a season anymore. We didn’t need to squeeze everything down to two, we could invite four. The possibilities felt endless, and the games felt bigger.
The big games seemed to happen every week in 2014. Just look at where College Gameday traveled that year. The show made its first trip to Oxford and Ole Miss, brought along Katy Perry, and the Rebels upset of Alabama that day is arguably the biggest win in Ole Miss history. At least in my lifetime.
The next week, Gameday traveled to see #3 Auburn play #2 Mississippi State, led by Dak Prescott. Dak’s team won, and Mississippi State - yes, Mississippi State – was the #1 team in the land for a full month. What was happening?
The week after that, Gameday headed to Tallahassee for a Top 5 matchup between Florida State and Notre Dame. Which Hollywood writer scripted the 2014 season? That instant classic ended in controversy when a late Notre Dame touchdown was overturned by a very, very questionable pass interference call.
The most amazing part about 2014 is that I haven’t even gotten to the most amazing part of 2014 – the late season surge by Ohio State.
Ohio State lost a bad game to Virginia Tech in September. In the pre-playoff era, they would only be playing for a Big Ten title after that. In the playoff era, they made a run for the ages that started in mid-November. They were ranked #13 when they went to East Lansing and smoked a top 10 Michigan State team.
The Buckeyes story took another wild twist when starting QB J.T. Barrett got hurt in the Michigan game and backup QB Cardale Jones led the Buckeyes to a 59-0 win in the Big Ten title game that vaulted them from #6 to #4 in the final poll, overtaking TCU and Baylor with the same record.
Oh, did you think controversy would be left in the BCS era?
However, there was something different about the 2014 playoff field because the general public accepted it. Florida State, despite being undefeated, was ranked #3. The committee was, at the time, showing that this was not the old BCS where all that mattered was a 0 in the loss column.
As great and memorable as the regular season was, the 2014 season hit a peak because of what happened on January 1st, 2015.
For the first time in nearly 20 years, a game that would decide the national championship would be played on New Year’s Day. I remember waking up that morning with the same feeling I had as a kid on New Year’s Day 1994 – today would be a special day of football.
It’s almost impossible to fathom now, but some college football writers were actually concerned the playoff would fail that December because the Rose Bowl wasn’t an instant sell-out. Florida State is pretty far from Pasadena.
The game did sell out and provided one of the most memorable bowl blowouts ever, as Oregon and Heisman Trophy winner Marcus Mariota embarrassed the Seminoles. While the season started with Winston’s best play, it ended with his worst – an awful fumble that led to an Oregon touchdown and a blowout.
That was only the preamble. The 2015 Sugar Bowl between Alabama and Ohio State is when it felt like a new era of college football had truly arrived. Big bad Alabama was a huge favorite and upstart Ohio State – yes, they were an upstart that year – knocked them on their ass. The image of Zeke Elliot sprinting to the endzone as Ohio State fans lose their minds is one of my favorite ever in college football.
The best playoff semifinal happened in year 1. We’ve been chasing that high ever since, and never quite got it.
The title game was endlessly hyped and nearly matched the viewer heights set by USC/Texas a decade earlier. The game didn’t quite live up to the hype, as Ohio State eventually pulled away to win a national title. It was a national title they could not have won in any year before 2014.
A few days later, the TV ratings came in and the four-team playoff proved more successful than anyone could have reasonably expected. The ratings were astronomical.
Of course, if the people running college football had brains, they would have realized that the semifinals should be played on New Year’s Day every year.
Instead, they actually tried to make football on New Year’s Eve a thing, and it failed spectacularly. The playoff ratings for New Year’s Eve semis in 2015 and 2016 were horrific. Instead of going back to New Year’s Day every year, they made an even dumber decision and played the semis on the last Saturday before New Year’s Day.
Nothing says college football like playing the semifinals on Dec. 27, before about 15 other bowls are played. Of course, this schedule sucked and the semifinal games started to suck, and within a few years, everyone kind of hated the playoff.
The playoff rankings turned into a joke after 2014, with obvious preferential treatment given to big names and the SEC/Big Ten. The notion of big September games mattering at all was quickly dismissed, and we soon returned to BCS-era scheduling of cupcakes. September 2022 produced a grand total of zero Top 10 games. Seriously, not even one.
The glory was short-lived, because college football can never get out of its own way. The four-team playoff has become such a mess that instead of calling for expansion, some, including yours truly, were actually yearning for a return to the BCS era.
What makes the four-team playoff era so frustrating is the tease that was 2014. We finally saw what could be possible by marrying a “traditional” college football season with an added round of playoffs. And we loved it.
We never saw it again. With the arrival of the 12-team playoff, we never will.
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