The folks who designed the 12-team College Football Playoff did everything in their power to reward conference champions, from automatic berths to byes to, in a couple of cases, artificially high seeding. But they can't win the games for them. The first semifinal field of the new era will comprise the SEC's runner-up (Texas), the Big Ten's runner-up (Penn State), the Big Ten's fourth-place team (Ohio State) and an independent (Notre Dame). They'll probably go and tweak the format next year.
The first thing that stands out: three schools from the East and Midwest, none from the Southeast. It's like 1976 came back from the dead. We'd become so accustomed to schools from the traditional SEC footprint dominating the sport that I'd genuinely come to believe by the mid-2010s that Ohio State was the only remaining northern school capable of winning a national championship. But then Michigan did it last season.
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