We have reached that point in time where we may no longer have to produce MNC Wednesday pieces, so today on Sunday Surmising, we will take a look at how college football finally joined the real world (mostly) to give us a real championship that the NCAA could consider sanctioning in the near future for that official stamp of “national champion” in the Football Bowl Subdivision sector of the sport. Wow, long sentence! Yikes!

The Heisman analysis entries for MNC Wednesday can continue, of course, but as the first real College Football Playoff Tournament Final approaches on January 20 in Atlanta, we have observed. passively. the unfolding of the 12-team battle royale for the big prize—and we approve, shockingly enough. The Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the Ohio State Buckeyes certainly have earned their way to have their title shots.

North Dakota State won the FCS Football Tournament Championship and always be the 2024 NCAA Division I Football champion of record, since the NCAA doesn’t run the CFP. But after watching the usually crooked CFP selection committee pick the 12 teams pretty transparently this time around, we felt the right 12 teams were going to play for the CFP title in a legitimate way for once. And then the games started …

And we were surprisingly impressed with almost all of the actual play on the field—with one exception that reeked of corruption to maximize some revenue for one of the semifinals. The tournament has been quirky, for sure, with all the higher seeds winning in the first round and all the higher seeds losing in the second round. There have been expected blowouts, surprising upsets, and really close instant classics: a fan’s dream.

Just like in March Madness, really. And that’s what the Bowl Championship Series and the CFP were always afraid of, really: losing control of who won what and how much money went elsewhere. This is Boise State was never “allowed” to play in the BCS/CFP events: small schools don’t bring in the same level of money, in theory, although they do galvanize the casual viewers more than imagined. Again, see March Madness?!

That one blip noted above—the distinct officials’ fuckery of not calling a penalty on Texas that would have cost the Longhorns the chance to advance to the Cotton Bowl semifinal in Dallas—has been the only real issue here with the first 12-team CFP tournament. Texas had been overrated all season, its first in the SEC, and despite all attempts to make that team advance, justice was served in the end with its bad coaching, etc.

And what would have been the problem with the Big XII champion playing in the Cotton Bowl instead? None, really, since Arizona State has a huge alumni base that could have mobilized for the semifinal in Dallas pretty easily. The CFP needs to learn to let its greedy grasp of the sport go, and what it will find is that more people will actually tune in than if they keep trying to control the revenue streams for greed.

We understand that all major sports (except the NHL, really) contrive some results the best they can to produce the most revenue possible: we have looked at the MLB realities, the NBA issues, and the NFL problems for years, in addition to examining college football—and to a lesser extent, college basketball. We also spent a decade in press boxes across the country in all these sports, dissecting it all from the inside.

It is what it is in a modern America that is sadly not learning from history: fraud never works in the end. Yet here we are in one of the more popular U.S. pastimes—college football—looking at a little bit of progress from what was from 1997-2023. It is possible to take steps forward even when it seems all around us is regressing. That’s something sports fans can celebrate when the Irish and the Buckeyes play in eight days.