College football brings the chaos
PLUS: Are running backs valuable again? And several thoughts on Donald Trump
Late on Friday night, I checked the score of the Georgia-Georgia Tech football game before going to bed.
Georgia, the defending national champions and a huge favourite over their in-state rivals, had just completed a huge comeback to tie the game at 24 as regulation time expired. Huh.
I figured I would watch the overtime.
What unfolded next was one of the most chaotic half hours of sport I can recall seeing. I use the word ‘sport’ there for a reason, because I’m not sure what happened was football.
The NCAA uses a fascinatingly weird overtime system. To begin, each team gets the ball at the opponent’s 25-yard line. They want teams to score quickly and end this sucker. Those kids have homework to do. If both teams remained tied after those drives, they go again. This is what happened in Athens on Friday. Touchdown, touchdown, back to the 25-yard line for each team. They both scored again. Which is where things get weird. As of the second overtime, both teams must attempt the two-point conversion instead of kicking for a single point. This is to avoid the scenario where teams exchange touchdowns for possession after possession. People have bedtimes, after all.
Both teams converted their two-point attempts. Which is where it gets really weird. After the second overtime, the teams go straight to two-point attempts. Like, a two-point conversion shootout. This is particularly funny because most teams would not practise very many different two-point attempts. You only need a couple, really. How often does any team try one more than twice in a game?
The fact that all of this was awkward quickly became apparent, as both Georgia and Tech kept whiffing on their conversion attempts. Passes were knocked down, or sailed out the back of the end zone. Neither team converted their first attempts, which was technically the third overtime period. They both missed on their second attempts, too. Tech converted their third attempt — in what was the fifth overtime period — but then Georgia matched them. Then both teams missed again through the next two overtime periods.
The funniest part is that the order of which team tried first switched between periods, so when a team had a game-winning attempt and missed, they then had to try first the next time. And would miss. And then the opponent would try first, and they would miss. It was like both teams completely forgot how to get into the end zone from three yards out. On five different occasions, after one of Georgia or Tech blew their conversion attempt, their opponent took a snap with the chance to win the game. And missed.
Finally, after Tech opened the eighth overtime by failing to convert — the Bulldogs were by this point blitzing like mad on every attempt — Georgia mixed things up by trying a rushing attempt, and waltzed into the end zone. Game, finally, over.
It was hilarious. And dumb. And, despite how goofy the whole thing was, it had huge national championship implications, as the squeaky-close victory allowed Georgia to finish the season at 10-2 and advance to a rematch against Texas (11-1) in the SEC Championship game this weekend, with a good chance to make it to the 12-team college football playoff regardless of what happens. One of the strangest quirks of college football is that even though teams are ranked by a selection committee that considers a host of factors in making its decisions, basically a team that wins a game is very unlikely to drop in the rankings. Even if, as was the case with Georgia, they barely survive against a much weaker opponent. Georgia Tech missed five — five! — two-point conversion attempts over that series of overtimes, and if they had made any of them they might well have snuffed out the Bulldogs’ hopes of repeating as champions.
And yet, had Georgia lost, they still would have made to the SEC title game, with a 6-2 conference record and holding the tiebreaker over 6-2 Tennessee, who they beat last month. In theory, a Bulldogs team that was 9-3 could have beaten Texas for the second time this year and then I genuinely don’t know which SEC teams (other than Georgia as the conference champion) would have made the 12-team field. Georgia, Tennessee, Texas? Those first two, and some third team that hadn’t already lost twice to Georgia? On Tuesday night, the CFP committee gave some indication by putting Alabama back into the playoff picture after Miami lost to Syracuse. But much remains undetermined. Four conference championship games on Saturday have playoff implications.
If you are a fan of chaos, this 12-team playoff seems like it would be right up your alley.
Mid-week reading
As it happens, I wrote about the playoff for theScore last week, before the final regular-season games, which aside from the Georgia thriller saw Ohio State lose to Michigan (but remain likely to make the 12-team field). The expanded playoff hasn’t made things worse than the four-team playoff it replaced, but nor has it solved any of the previous version’s problems.
My other piece for theScore was about the NFL’s running back renaissance. OR IS IT? Yes, Saquon Barkley and Derrick Henry are having great years after switching teams. But I’m not convinced their performances are going to reset the value of a position that had, from a roster-building perspective, been fading from importance.
Politics corner
For the Toronto Star, a column on Donald Trump and tariffs.
It’s impossible to know if Trump, in making the pronouncement on his Truth Social platform on Monday night about his first-day-on-the-job tariff plan understands all this and is being disingenuous, or if he truly doesn’t get it.
And, also for the Star, a column on Trump, getting away with it. All of it, really.
Trump refused to accept the results of an election, tried to stage a coup, incited an angry mob to storm the U.S. Capitol — then was allowed to seek the presidency again and won. He was convicted of fraudulently hiding hush money payments to a porn star— then managed to delay his own sentencing so long it appears likely he’ll never be sentenced at all. It is a truly wild set of circumstances.