There are some good years and some bad years in the College Football Playoff rotation. I talked about this fact earlier in the fall.
This year’s is the worst of the rotations. Because all three “Contract Bowls”, meaning bowls with tie-ins, are outside the semifinals, there is only room for one at-large team. That at-large and the mandated Group of 5 representative must play in the Cotton Bowl because there is nowhere else to put them.
Florida got the chicken, uh, salad sandwich of playing No. 24 Virginia in the Orange Bowl. There should be some kind of provision in these contracts that voids a tie-in if a conference doesn’t have a team — or a second team, as would be applicable this year when the champ is in the semis — in the top 15 or so. The conferences would never do that, of course, because they want their guaranteed money. It also would put the committee in an awkward spot if it ranked a UVA team that didn’t lose to Miami or Louisville at No. 16. Conspiracy theories would abound even more than they do now.
If the Rose and Sugar were semifinals, Georgia would be the ones going to Miami to play the Cavaliers. UF would then go in a pile of five at-larges plus G5 rep Memphis for the six wide open spots of the Fiesta, Cotton, and Peach Bowls. The committee’s instructions tell them not to send a team to the same bowl multiple times in a short span if it can be helped, so UF almost certainly wouldn’t go to the Peach Bowl again.
Instead, they’d either go to the desert to play Oregon or JerryWorld to play Baylor. The Fiesta is the more enticing of those since the Bears needed four close wins over clearly inferior teams, including all of the bottom three Big 12 teams that missed bowls, to finish where they did. The Ducks are more your classic Pac-12 champ, a legit good team that isn’t in the playoff because it messed around and dropped a road game at a mid-level conference opponent (Arizona State, in their case).
If the Orange and Cotton were semifinals, Virginia wouldn’t even get a NY6 spot because the ACC auto-bid would be gone. No. 11 Utah would get that spot instead, and the Utes along with No. 9 Florida, No. 10 Penn State, and G5 Memphis would be the pool for the Fiesta and Peach Bowls. Here it’s more certain that keeping the Gators out of the Peach puts them in the Fiesta, and they’d face Utah there.
Does a Fiesta Bowl matchup with Oregon or Utah sound better than playing Virginia in the Orange Bowl to you? If so, you can thank the Power 5 conference commissioners plus the AD at Notre Dame for setting up the Playoff in the way they did. I’m going to argue against expanding the playoff in a piece for the main GC site this week, but I won’t defend the exact design of what they have.
So here’s my best attempt at shining up the bowl matchup.
Virginia is at least a power conference team, and beating the second-best* team in the league gives Gator fans a chance to dunk on the ACC. I think it beats facing a likely head coach-less Memphis in the Cotton Bowl, the place UF would’ve gone had Bama stayed ahead of them in the rankings, where maybe even the current interim isn’t there anymore. That’d be like facing 2009 Cincinnati under its second interim again, only without whatever major conference shine the Big East still clung to by then.
The Orange Bowl matchup is also a better chance at a victory lap for the first two years of the Dan Mullen era. There would be something to beating up on the new Florida State head coach’s former team, sure, but Memphis is better than its committee ranking. The SP+ advanced stats ratings have the Tigers at No. 13 with the eighth-best offense in the country, and the Gators would be a 4.6-point favorite.
Meanwhile, Virginia clocks in at No. 45. The Cavs have the 57th-rated offense and 44th-rated defense, and the system has UF a 17.4-point favorite. I put an asterisk aside “second-best” in the ACC above because SP+ has Virginia Tech at No. 40 and North Carolina at No. 39. By some reputable measures, UVA’s not the ACC’s second-best team even if their record ended up that way.
Florida has distanced itself from the others in the Big 3, and now it’ll play in the state of Florida’s premier bowl game in the most talent-rich area it has to offer. It’s no secret that UF needs to improve its recruiting even more than Mullen already has to this point. If they focus and no one else besides CJ Henderson decides to skip the bowl, the Gators can cruise to an aesthetically pleasing victory on the state’s biggest stage.
Florida won’t be able to kick Clemson out of the state from a recruiting standpoint soon; Georgia has been an elite recruiter for years now and Dabo is eating its lunch at the very top of its in-state talent this year. What Florida can do is send a definitive message that players who want to stay home and achieve excellence must go to Gainesville, and maybe the Florida staff can make some headway on evicting some of the SEC competition for recruits.
After all, it’s still Virginia. There’s only so much beating a UVA team with a 24 next to its name can do. The College Football Playoff’s design naturally makes for some lousy pairings sometimes, and Florida got one of them.
It’s still better than playing a road game against Louisiana Tech the day after Christmas in the Independence Bowl, as Miami is doing, or playing Herm Edwards’s sleep-inducing Arizona State team in a virtual road game in El Paso as FSU is doing. Better to have maybe the worst of the New Year’s Six games than not be in one at all.