Looking for college football injustice? The victim is WSU, not Notre Dame

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One quarterback who transferred out of Washington State was chosen first overall in this year’s NFL Draft. That was Cam Ward.

Another quarterback who transferred out of Washington State will be starting for Oklahoma when it hosts Alabama in the first round of the college football playoffs next week. That would be John Mateer.

This week, the Cougs lost their second football coach in the span of 356 days as Jimmy Rogers sat in front of a microphone and said the one thing that Iowa State could count on was his authenticity.

Yet it’s Notre Dame that is going to skip its bowl game? Do I have that right?

Yep, the Fighting Irish are so furious they were passed over in the college football playoffs they’re just going to take their ball and go home. Their athletic director has even made it clear he’s super mad at the ACC, the conference Notre Dame belongs to for most sports, though notably not football.

On the one hand, I find this pretty funny given how many times we’ve watched an overmatched Notre Dame team get smoked in a postseason game they didn’t deserve to be in.

On the other hand, I find myself thinking about all the changes college football has endured over the past two years: The conferences that have consolidated, and in one case collapsed. The programs like Washington State, which have been left behind.

And for what?

To create bloated conferences with meaningless championship games that give way to a playoff selection that inevitably leaves someone hopping mad.

Last year, it was Alabama that felt it got jobbed (even though it lost to Vanderbilt). This year, it’s Notre Dame that’s throwing a hissy fit (even though it lost to the Miami).

I’m not saying the Irish don’t have a case for making the playoffs. They absolutely do. They’ve won 10 in a row, they have one fewer loss than this year’s Alabama team and neither of Notre Dame’s defeats look as bad in retrospect as the Tide’s loss to Florida State.

Of course, nobody at Notre Dame was complaining when it appeared the Irish were going to get into the playoffs ahead of Miami, which had beaten the Irish by three points in the first week of the year.

Then again, that Miami team also lost twice and didn’t even play for its own conference championship because a five-loss Duke team held a tiebreaker advantage over the ‘Canes.

It is kind of funny just how messy all this is, and this is the point where we usually start to talk about what would be necessary to create a better, more objective system. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place, though.

For years, college football fans have been told that the real problem in their sport is the lack of a national playoff. Every attempt to institute such a system, however, has resulted in howling complaints whether it was against the BCS, the four-team playoff or – now – with a 12-team format that people like ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit argue really needs to be 16 teams.

The issue isn’t the format, though. It’s the fact that college football is particularly ill-suited to a playoff and that’s because it is structured more like medieval Europe than a cohesive national sport. You’ve got an array of nobles and local warlords who are arranged in arbitrary and ever-changing regional alliances with a few walled cities wealthy enough to make their own rules by threatening to lower the gates and freeze everyone out.

It is impossible to create a truly objective criteria for evaluating this country’s best college football teams because the levels of competition vary so greatly from conference to conference. Hell, teams are hard-pressed to play more than half their conference these days.

I know that this isn’t going to change any time soon. Not when there’s more money to be milked out of these TV networks.

What I would humbly request is that everyone recognize the true injustice of this situation, which is not the fact that Notre Dame (for once) found itself getting the business end of the stick.

The injustice is what has happened to Washington State. This is a school that regularly punched above its weight, a team with a proud tradition of quarterbacks. They’ve made the Rose Bowl twice in my lifetime, and when Drew Bledsoe was chosen first overall back in 1992, it wasn’t after he’d transferred somewhere else.

I miss those days, and so far, having a 12-team playoff hasn’t proven to be all that much of an upgrade.

Danny O’Neil was born in Oregon, the son of a logger, but had the good sense to attend college in Washington. He’s covered Seattle sports for 20 years, writing for two newspapers, one glossy magazine and hosting a daily radio show for eight years on KIRO 710 AM. You can subscribe to his free newsletter and find his other work at dannyoneil.com.

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