What a great game last night. To be honest, although I’ve always been an NFL guy, for the last two years, the College Football Playoff has been much, much more entertaining than the NFL playoffs, despite the many close games in the latter, mostly because watching CJ Stroud throw interceptions and Caleb Williams lobbing blind moonballs from 30 yards behind the line of scrimmage is less entertaining than two college powerhouses trading knockdown punches.
Indiana was the better team, but that Miami defense was downright ferocious. Miami missed a field goal in the first half, but Indiana should have put the ball away before giving Miami its last chance; false-starting inside the opposing 10 on 2nd-and-1 was very surprising coming from such a well-disciplined team. I wasn’t surprised by the blocked punt, as it looked like they were getting close on the two previous punts, but I was surprised by Fletcher’s 57-yard TD run.
I very much appreciated the way in which Cignetti was coaching to win, as both the end of the first half Hail Mary and the decision to go for it on 4th-and-goal from the five instead of kicking a field goal demonstrated. He made it very clear that Indiana was playing to win the national championship, not avoid losing it.
Anyhow, there are some serious problems with the new system, especially the way players who are talked into going into the portal find themselves in limbo when no one picks them up. But in general, and no matter how much I dislike the oversized power conferences and the decline of traditional conferences like the Pac-10 – which is its proper name, not the Pac-8, the Pac-12, or the Pac-2, although the latter was pretty funny – the various changes have definitely been very good for spurring more interest in what has become a much more competitive game.
Ironically, the first college game I ever attended was when Indiana played Minnesota in Minneapolis in 1976. The Gophers won, 32-13. And in the fifty years since, I would not ever have believed that Indiana would win its first national championship before Minnesota won its eighth.