College Football Is Terrified of a Cinderella
The inaugural 12-team playoff is here. What happens if the little guy wins?
Eighteen years removed from the most stirring upset in college football history, the rewatch still washes over you like a dream. It wasn’t that Boise State beat Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl; it was the way Boise State beat Oklahoma, on a series of miracles that felt as if they’d been choreographed to an Explosions in the Sky song:
A hook-and-lateral on the game-tying drive. A Statue of Liberty play on a two-point conversion. A 43-42 Boise State win, followed by a spontaneous and nationally televised marriage proposal from the team’s star running back. In a single evening, Boise State became the public face of something college football had shunted aside for nearly its entire history: the charming underdog.
For the first century and a half of its existence, major college football drew a clear line between the haves and the have-nots. This sport was dominated by entrenched power players who trafficked in tradition, which mostly meant the same handful of teams competing for championships year after year. This, the power players believed, was what people wanted to see. Even after that Fiesta Bowl, Boise State regularly got relegated to an antechamber: Despite going 12-0 during the 2008 regular season, the Broncos finished ninth in the final Bowl Championship Series standings, behind seven one-loss teams. In 2009, Boise State went 12-0 again; the Broncos finished sixth in the BCS standings.
Yet in retrospect, it feels like something fundamental began to break on that New Year’s Day in 2007.
Boise State–Oklahoma was impossibly cinematic. It was the first college football game that evoked the sheer euphoria of a Cinderella story in the early rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament. That Fiesta Bowl planted a question into the collective consciousness of those who watched and wrote about the sport: Why can’t we have more of this?
“The BCS gave the Broncos their moment on stage and then quickly ushered them out the side door,” Andrew Bagnato of The Associated Press wrote in 2007 after that game. “In a playoff, the power conferences would have to deal with Boise State every year. … The BCS doesn’t want to see Boise State every year. … This is as good as it gets for Boise State—for now, and maybe forever.”
Change does not come easily in college football, but over the past few years, it feels like the changes have come nonstop. And a generation after Boise State planted that seed in people’s minds, forever has actually arrived. The inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff will begin this weekend, and Boise State, by virtue of winning the Mountain West, has not only qualified but landed a top-four seed and a first-round bye. SMU is in the field, and Alabama is not. Arizona State is in, and Ole Miss is not. Indiana is in, and Miami is not. Amid seismic shifts in the sport’s landscape driven by realignment, the transfer portal, and NIL money, parity appears to have crashed the party.
Over the next month, it is legitimately possible that a team excluded from the sport’s short list of traditional powers could not only compete for a national championship but win a national championship. This tournament is the most egalitarian moment in college football history, by far. And for certain people, this feels like a problem.
Merely by choosing ACC runner-up SMU over SEC behemoth Alabama for the final at-large spot in this season’s playoff, the selection committee appeared to disregard the sport’s longstanding history of genuflecting to entrenched power. This upset some of the people who helped install the 12-team playoff in the first place. Already, those power-conference brokers are trying to reconfigure the system further in their favor by expanding the field to 14 teams as soon as 2026 and contractually stipulating that the Big Ten and SEC get a much larger share of the overall revenue. In the wake of the selection of SMU over Alabama, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey is among those publicly arguing that changes need to be made to the playoff format before a single game has been played. “We’re seeing the stress points that we knew would be there, but I actually think they are as or more volatile than we thought,” Sankey told Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports earlier this month. “Now we have a whole different [conference] dynamic. So what happens?”
In a nuclear scenario, the Big Ten and SEC could form super-conferences, break away from the NCAA altogether, and join hands with a private equity fund to ensure that their hegemony persists. This would leave Boise State, and every future iteration of Boise State, in the dust.
Of course, maybe Georgia, Oregon, or Ohio State will plow through this playoff bracket and maintain the historical pattern of the most powerful teams dominating everything. But if the unexpected occurs over the next several weeks—if a team like Boise State somehow wins the national championship—it could completely upend the system at a fragile moment. It seems inevitable that those in power will make it harder for something like this to happen again; it also seems feasible that they’ll make it impossible for something like this to happen again.
Boise State–Oklahoma was a quaint miracle that helped break things open for the little guy. If another miracle occurs, it could threaten the central identity of a sport that, for more than a century, has thrived as an unrepentant oligarchy. And that may be too much for college football to bear.
One of the first miracles in college football history took place on October 29, 1921. That day, a team from tiny Centre College in Danville, Kentucky—the Praying Colonels—defeated the powerhouse Harvard Crimson, 6-0, behind a 26-year-old student named Alvin “Bo” McMillin. The Ivy League gave birth to major college football and had a stranglehold on the sport in those early years. Before that October afternoon, Harvard had won 28 consecutive games and hadn’t lost a regular-season game since 1916; it had also won 44 straight intersectional games until the loss to Centre. Even after Centre lost to Texas A&M later that season and faded back into obscurity, the legacy of its win over Harvard lived on: It helped crack open the firmament of East Coast football and nationalize the sport.
Over the course of the 20th century, as the Ivy League de-emphasized football, new power structures formed around regional interests. The Big Ten. The SEC. The Big Eight. The Pac-10 (on occasion). Notre Dame. Those who followed the sport and those who voted in national polls presumed they knew who the good teams were because the same teams were always the good teams, and the good teams played the strongest schedules because they had the ability to play the other good teams. Dynasties were a regular occurrence, from Notre Dame and Army to Oklahoma and Alabama.
College football’s poll era was driven by perpetual argument, but that argument stayed within the oligarchy. When Arizona State surprised everyone by going 12-0 in 1975, the Sun Devils finished second in the AP poll, behind 11-1 Oklahoma. The sport was top-heavy, and every so often, an outsider would come along and question the status quo by proposing a playoff. In response, those with vested interests—bowl executives, conference officials, university presidents, and athletic directors—would band together in resistance, and nothing would ultimately change.
It took years of striving for a new team to enter the firmament. Penn State proved itself a threatening East Coast independent in the late 1960s and early 1970s; the Nittany Lions went undefeated three times during that stretch yet never finished higher than second in the polls. By the 1980s, however, they had been invited into the establishment. And once Penn State was in, the tables turned: When its 1982 team went 11-1 and beat Georgia in the Sugar Bowl, it was voted no. 1 in the polls ahead of 11-0-1 SMU, a team that featured two of the best running backs in college football history, Eric Dickerson and Craig James. “This calls for some kind of playoff system,” SMU coach Bobby Collins said at the time. “This really bothers me.”
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Only once did a team truly emerge from out of nowhere to win the national championship: BYU, then a member of the Western Athletic Conference, went undefeated in 1984 while defeating only one ranked team (then–no. 3 Pitt, which wound up going 3-7-1) and playing few of its games on national television. The Cougars beat a mediocre Michigan team in the Holiday Bowl and were voted the national champions largely by default because all the other top teams kept losing. “It’s a system,” Barry Switzer, then coaching at Oklahoma, told The Washington Post. “What can you expect from a system?”
BYU’s fluky season was quickly flushed from the sport’s collective consciousness. By the 1990s, college football’s power structure had stabilized. The BCS was designed to match up the two best teams in the national championship while preserving the bowl system. Though the formula often failed, all 32 teams that played in the national title game between 1998 and 2014 hailed from the sport’s preeminent class.
Things didn’t change much during the first phase of the playoff era: A school outside a Power Five conference (Cincinnati) was selected to be part of the four-team field only once over the course of 10 years. UCF went undefeated during the 2017 and 2018 regular seasons, and it still couldn’t get anywhere near the top four. (UCF did eventually force its way into the Big 12.) If anything, the dream of an underdog having a shot to compete for a national championship seemed to be fading further from view.
But then came a mandate for change from the top: According to Yahoo’s Dellenger, representatives from the Pac-12 and Big Ten grew tired of Southern hegemony and declared about six years ago that they were ready to expand the playoff. When an interested collection of executives gathered to brainstorm formats for an expanded system, that working group included Craig Thompson, then-commissioner of the Mountain West, a conference whose profile had been elevated by the presence of Boise State. “In the early days,” Dellenger wrote, “they established one very important goal: grant access, in some way, to the Group of Five.”
The payoff for the oligarchy would be an incredible windfall of television money, as well as more power programs from outside the South getting to contend for a national championship. The bone thrown to teams like Boise State was one guaranteed playoff slot for a champion from a smaller conference. This appeared to be a harmless proposition because it was unlikely to stop oligarchic programs—most notably Georgia, Clemson, Alabama, and Ohio State—from trading titles between them.
But what if, amid all these furious shifts in the sport’s infrastructure, the competitive balance of college football actually changed too? Is it possible that after 150 years, college football is finally giving way to actual egalitarianism? By attempting to grab more and more for itself, did the oligarchy inadvertently break its grip on the system?
Eighteen years after that 2007 Fiesta Bowl, let’s allow ourselves to indulge in another flight of fancy. Let’s imagine that three of the four semifinalists in this College Football Playoff wind up being Indiana, Arizona State, and Boise State.
It’s not an impossible scenario, given that if Indiana beats Notre Dame, it will face Georgia—a team that will likely be starting a backup quarterback after Carson Beck went down with a UCL injury in the SEC championship game. It’s not an impossible scenario, given that Arizona State, led by star running back Cam Skattebo, has played some of the best football in the country over the second half of the season. And it’s not an impossible scenario, given that Boise State running back Ashton Jeanty—who declined to transfer to a larger school in part because the Broncos had as good of a shot at making the playoff as anyone else—is putting together one of the best seasons any college running back has ever had.
Then let’s say Arizona State defeats Ohio State or Oregon or Tennessee, and let’s say that Boise State defeats Indiana. And let’s say Boise State defeats Arizona State to win the national championship.
Is college football ready for any of this?
Would an outcome like this be dismissed as an extreme outlier driven by the transfer portal and conference realignment? Or would it represent a true paradigm shift, where small-conference teams and second-tier schools in major conferences would become perennially relevant to the national title picture? SEC commissioner Sankey said in October that the first year of the 12-team playoff format “has to go incredibly well.” Would a startling scenario like this give Sankey and Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti the cover to walk away from the NCAA altogether?
Boise State’s 2007 Fiesta Bowl fairytale “made the BCS folk look like geniuses. It also gave them another reason to do everything they can to prevent a playoff,” wrote the AP’s Bagnato. “The more exposure and money [programs like Boise] receive, the bigger and badder they’ll become.”
Eighteen years later, the moment has arrived. A window has opened. For the first time ever, anything is actually possible in college football. Enjoy it while you can because, like a dream, it may soon disappear.
