This January, it will have been eight years since Georgia lost in the national championship game to Alabama in Atlanta on Tua Tagovailoa’s walk-off touchdown pass to DeVonta Smith, one of the most brutal things I’ve ever seen at a sporting event.
It was basically college football’s equivalent of the Blue Jays’ World Series loss this October: having your heart ripped out of your chest and being forced to watch Nick Saban eat it right in front of you. Everything a fan base has ever wanted, just a second-and-26 in overtime away, snatched away in an instant. I was at Mercedes-Benz Stadium that night, and the only way I knew how to describe what happened was to talk to Georgia fans as if they had just been in a serious car accident, to let them know that no matter how it feels right now, they would survive this. They would heal. They would someday be OK.
Fair to say, I turned out to be right: Georgia fans did end up getting everything they ever wanted (twice, no less) and now everybody’s sick of them in the same way everybody used to be sick of Alabama. (Which was also all Georgia fans ever wanted.) And that’s the thing about your team winning a national championship: It will change your life. All the drama, all the angst, all the frustration, all the angry message board posts, all the screaming at your television, all the fall weddings you spent staring at your phone in the bathroom? It all proves worth it. The joy won’t last forever — LSU has imploded, like, five times since winning its title six years ago, and Michigan is already catching up two years after winning — but you’re still not quite the same person after your team wins a title as you were before.
And there are ramifications for the rest of us when a team wins a title, too. Imagine how different the Notre Dame discourse would have been over the past week if it had won the title last year, or how the coaching carousel would have been different had Washington beaten Michigan two years ago. These games change everything for everybody.
And the winner could — at least theoretically — be anybody. So, before the College Football Playoff kicks off Friday night, let’s take a look at how the world changes and what the ramifications are if each of the 12 teams involved ends up winning the national title on Jan. 19. Consider these 12 alternative realities.
12. James Madison Dukes
Hey: Not so impressed by Curt Cignetti now, are ya? If James Madison were to somehow pull off the most shocking postseason run in American sports history — and that’s exactly what this would be — it would readjust what every college football fan considers possible in a way that would even exceed Cignetti’s unprecedented success since leaving JMU for Indiana two years ago.
This would be George Mason in the Final Four crossed with Leicester City winning the Premier League plus Buster Douglas beating Mike Tyson multiplied by Jesse Ventura becoming the governor of Minnesota. Forget taking away CFP slots from G5 teams: Can we build the whole plane out of them? Also: You thought Gainesville was hard? Good luck following that, Billy Napier. While we’re at it: What’s Bob Chesney’s buyout at UCLA? Because I’m pretty sure this would get him promoted, probably to god emperor. Yeah: This would be the most amazing thing that’s ever happened in college football, and maybe on earth.
11. Tulane Green Wave
It’s possible Tulane is the worst team in the field, but it probably has a better chance to win its first game than James Madison does. Legitimate question: If Ole Miss loses its opener, does that make us all hate Lane Kiffin more, or less? (I’m honestly not sure.)
For what it’s worth, a team from Louisiana that’s not LSU winning the national title makes Kiffin’s job that much harder and that whole fan base that much more demanding: I wonder what the governor would have to say about it. Tulane winning would lock in that automatic qualifier for a G5 even more securely than a JMU win would, considering it would have beaten, in succession, likely Ole Miss, Georgia, Ohio State (or Miami/Texas A&M), and then whatever team came out of the other side of the bracket. Imagine the ESPN roundtable after that many SEC teams bit the dust.
Also: Mardi Gras in New Orleans is one month after the CFP title game, if you’re making travel plans.
10. Miami Hurricanes
All the problems the ACC had this year vanish in an instant: It turns out the conference had a powerhouse all along. (It still probably needs to fix those tiebreakers.) All those celebrity Miami fans who have been hiding out for the last 30 years or so, apparently too busy to actually attend any Hurricanes games in that time, will be everywhere: A-Rod will ascend to heretofore unattainable levels of insufferable. Jon Sumrall’s job at Florida gets that much harder, and it’s possible Mike Norvell is too afraid to come out of his house until April. Also, welcome back to the Instagram discourse, Carson Beck. It’s safe to return again.
9. Alabama Crimson Tide
I could go into all sorts of detail about Notre Dame having even more egg on its face, or the relentless and inescapable SEC triumphalism, or how impossible watching ESPN will become, but, frankly, considering the current attitudes toward Kalen DeBoer from large swaths of the Alabama fan base, I only really feel comfortable saying that the primary result of Alabama winning the national championship this year would be Alabama fans deciding, OK, fine, we’ll give him one more year.
8. Oklahoma Sooners
One suspects Lincoln Riley — or his agent, anyway — might be a little quieter after a Sooners title. This would actually be a classic opportunity for John Mateer, who looked early this season like he was going to become a college football folk hero in the Baker Mayfield/Diego Pavia mode, to be the sport’s main character, a role he seems more than ready for. And do you need more Brian Bosworth in your life? Because the Sheriff of Fansville will be everywhere you look.
The good news here? If an SEC team has to win the national title, you might as well hope it’s the one that is still generally forgotten to be an SEC team, not least of which by fans of other SEC teams themselves.
7. Texas A&M Aggies
I argued a few weeks back that the Aggies might have the most tortured fan base of any big-time program in all of college football. They have not won a national title since 1939, despite the best efforts of a terrifyingly large percentage of this country’s oil and gas revenue. We could theoretically have a Ryan Day problem on our hands, though: It’s great that you won the national title and all, but next time, you’d better beat Texas.
Texas A&M hasn’t won a title since 1939 — and has only four AP top-five finishes ever. (Alex Slitz / Getty Images)
6. Ole Miss Rebels
Imagine if Larry David’s Spite Store ended up turning into Walmart. The national schadenfreude that would result from Lane Kiffin leaving Ole Miss right before his team won a national title without him could power Jupiter and several of its moons. It would instantly turn its new coach Pete Golding — who is colloquially known among some Ole Miss fans as “Widespread Pete,” because he looks exactly like what every person who attended Widespread Panic’s infamous “Panic in the Streets” show in Athens, Ga. — into an icon for middle-aged Dad Water drinkers the world over. Coaches, they’re just like us!
5. Oregon Ducks
Dan Lanning rockets to the top of every A Little Too Intense, Man coaching watchlist: He’s the sort of maniac who may need a national title to truly cross over to the mainstream. Not only would this at last erase Oregon fans’ memories of losing the first CFP title game 11 years ago, but it would give the Big Ten its third different national champion in three years, which would not only allow the conference to jut out its chest but would cause every Penn State fan you know to run screaming into traffic.
4. Texas Tech Red Raiders
It has been a little underappreciated how much it would roil college football if Texas Tech wins the national championship. Fairly or unfairly, it is widely accepted dogma that Texas Tech has broken through this year because of its absurdly rich (and very loud) benefactor Cody Campbell and his willingness to pay for whatever player the Red Raiders might need (specifically on defense).
If Texas Tech — a team that hadn’t finished in the top 10 of the final AP poll ever before this season — comes out of nowhere and wins the whole thing, it will be seen, really more than any other school winning, as the current college football excesses run cartoonishly amok, something that has no connection to education, or tradition, or anything other than a billionaire oil guy whipping out his checkbook. I am not saying this is entirely fair — the story is more complicated than that, as any Texas Tech fan will tell you; the Red Raiders had been making year-after-year progress under Joey McGuire before this year’s explosion — but I am also not saying this is entirely unfair.
Either way: It will become the center of every conversation and, I suspect, would cause a minor-to-semi-major cataclysm in the sport.
3. Georgia Bulldogs
How wild has the college football coaching carousel gotten? Kirby Smart — who honestly still feels like he just got there — is the 10th-longest tenured active coach. That’s incredible. A title would be his third since arriving to coach his alma mater and would bring his career record to 120-20 (with five of those losses coming in his first season, with seven of them to Alabama). It would put him within four titles of his mentor Nick Saban, in 18 fewer seasons. And it would still feel like he is just getting started. It is difficult to overstate how unbearable you will find Dawgs fans if this happens. (They won’t mind, or probably even notice.)
2. Ohio State Buckeyes
I will be gentle and kind and not go back to find every single media person who thought Ryan Day was done, sautéed, flambéed, pan-fried, after he lost to Michigan last year. But just so you know, it was all of them. Don’t act too superior, you thought the same thing, so did I, so did just about every Ohio State fan. If Ohio State wins the national title this year, Day will have responded to that supposed career-ending loss with two consecutive national championships and will have an 85-11 record as the Buckeyes head coach. Like DeBoer, I suspect this will buy him a year or two, maybe.
1. Indiana Hoosiers
No offense to the fantastical notion of James Madison or Tulane winning, but this would be the biggest possible story for college football, and one that, frankly, would provide a narrative that those in charge of the sport (whoever they are anymore) could provide as an antidote to all those who claim college football is somehow unfair or in trouble. Basically, Curt Cignetti would have done something that, if you did it in a video game, all your friends would claim happened only because you set the difficulty level too low.
He will have taken a school with zero football history and not only won a national championship with it, but done so comprehensively with an undefeated season and, more importantly, done so immediately. It will make every other school furious that their coach wasn’t able to do this, it will turn “Google Me” into a schoolyard and conference room boast that may last for the rest of our days on this planet, and it will be definitive proof that this truly is the most unpredictable and honking mad sport fathomable.
I’ll be honest: I think it would be absolutely wonderful. I’m rooting for it. And if you’re an otherwise unaffiliated fan in this College Football Playoff … I think you should be rooting for it too.