Champ Week recap – CFP gets it right, Heisman watch, bowls we love

The 2022 college football regular season was a hell of a journey.

It began with Northwestern getting Nebraska’s Scott Frost all but fired in Ireland. It gave us App State’s all-time trio of incredible September games — the 63-61 loss to North Carolina, the 17-14 win over Texas A&M, the Hail Mary win over Troy with “GameDay” in town. It gave us Alabama’s road travails — the Tide barely beat Texas, then lost to Tennessee and LSU, all in down-to-the-wire classics.

It gave us Jalon Daniels’ September Heisman run as Kansas — yes, Kansas! — stole the hearts of the college football public. It gave us an all-time Saturday in Week 7, with fans rushing the field in Knoxville, Fort Worth, Salt Lake and Syracuse. It gave us San Jose State’s win for No. 6. It gave us a November as topsy-turvy as most in recent memory.

And in the end, it gave us the most straightforward College Football Playoff race one can imagine, one that was sewn up before most of Saturday’s conference championship games had kicked.

Once USC got thumped by Utah on Friday night — opening the door for Ohio State to get a mulligan after last week’s loss to Michigan — and once TCU didn’t get blown out by Kansas State, that was that. We ended up with two unbeaten power-conference champions and two one-loss non-champions, and those are the four teams with a shot at the national title.

Jump to:
Final four vignettes | Favorite bowl matchups |
Heisman of the week | Favorite Champ Week games

Did the committee get it right? (Yes, yes it did.)

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The four teams selected for the College Football Playoff are Georgia, Michigan, TCU and Ohio State.

In a future universe, with an expanded 12-team CFP, we’d have had extra stakes for games like KSU-TCU, Utah-USC and Clemson-UNC this weekend — two of the three winners would have earned first-round byes (and both Clemson-UNC and Tulane-UCF would have been win-and-you’re-in-games).

And since his team would have been an obvious at-large selection, Alabama’s Nick Saban wouldn’t have had to go on every TV network available to campaign for his team’s inclusion on Saturday night.

(My favorite was when he explained how Bama would have been favored over TCU to Lacey Chabert on Lifetime, and she pointed out that the Tide lost twice as favorites this season. Just kidding. Or am I?)

As things currently stand, the committee was primarily tasked with selecting just four teams for inclusion, and despite Saban’s protestations that was pretty easy to figure out.

For the last few weeks…