The all-playoff era team: The best players of the past decade

Who were the best players of the four-team playoff era (2014-23) in college football?

It’s a simple premise and yet a near-impossible challenge. The story of the past decade of college football is littered with superstars — from Lamar Jackson‘s mystifying talent to Baker Mayfield planting the Oklahoma flag at Ohio State to Tua Tagovailoa rescuing Alabama from the brink of defeat to a former walk-on in Stetson Bennett putting an end to Georgia’s miserable four-decade streak without a national title. The list of campus legends is extensive.

But when an era comes to an end, as the four-team playoff has, it requires a proper accounting and some hard choices to be made.

So, challenge accepted.

Our goal is to not just identify the players who won the most or posted the best stats or had the most highlights. Even that would’ve been difficult. But rather, this list is meant to include all those metrics and also something more ephemeral — to reward the players whose performances were so essential to the fabric of college football over the past 10 years, that the story of the four-team playoff era couldn’t be told without them.

Here are our choices for the best of the best at each position from the past decade of college football: Our All-Playoff Era team.

Quarterback

Joe Burrow, LSU

A conundrum: Is it better to celebrate sustained success or epic, if short-lived, greatness? Certainly, other quarterbacks — from Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence to Tagovailoa to Mayfield — offered more over the course of longer college careers. But no one offered such a breathtaking high watermark as Burrow, whose 2019 season at LSU effectively reimagined what a quarterback could accomplish.

He passed for 5,671 yards and 60 touchdowns while completing 76.3% of his throws. In seven games against ranked foes, he averaged 10.3 yards per pass with 27 touchdowns and just two picks. Put another way, he had more TD passes against ranked teams in 2019 than all but 11 QBs had total in 2023. There remains, of course, a strong case for the utter magic of Jackson, the immediate brilliance of Lawrence, the championship drive of Bennett or the sheer amount of Mayfield’s success. But in the end, how can we choose anyone but Burrow? We’ve learned never to say never in sports, but it’s hard to fathom we’ll see a season like Burrow’s 2019 campaign again soon.

Second team: Deshaun…