College Football Playoff What If: The 2009 Boise St. Broncos and TCU Horned Frogs
Editors Note: With the announcement of a deal on the college football playoff, we’re going back and looking at all of the BCS Busters and seeing which of them would have made the Playoffs.
Previous What If’s:
Playoff Contenders for the 2009 Season:
Alabama 13-0
Texas 13-0
TCU 12-0
Boise St. 12-0
Cincinnati 12-0
Florida 12-1
How It Likely Would Have Shaken Out:
This season would be the first one where you can definitively say a non-BCS team makes the playoff. The top two seeds would of course be Alabama and Texas. Then you have four schools for those remaining two slots. Cincinnatti was ranked 3rd at the time and with the Big East having more power than they should, my guess would be they are in. That leaves Boise St., TCU and Florida for one final spot.
TCU had risen to #4 in the rankings, they had a very nice profile, their only losses in the last two seasons were to Oklahoma and Utah.
Florida only lost in the SEC title game to Alabama. But here is where conference championships are supposed to matter. Plus Florida’s SOS wasn’t wildly better than TCU this season. I really believe TCU gets this slot. But if not, it would have gone to Florida and it’s my belief Boise St. would have been left out, AGAIN.
The seeds 1. Alabama, 2. Texas, 3. TCU, 4. Cincinnati. Bama crushes Cincy and TCU stuns Texas. In the final, TCU handles Bama’s unsophisticated offense pretty easily because TCU also has “southern speed.” (and honestly of all the stupid things said before the Utah-Bama Sugar Bowl, the concept of “southern speed” was the stupidest).
The MWC has a national champion and if Utah had been invited a year before, they just might have back to back champions.
Other What If’s:
If TCU didn’t get the seed they did, it would have gone to Florida. Honestly I don’t see any way Boise makes a playoff here. But for S&G’s lets say the seeds are 3. TCU, 4. Boise. Don’t forget that Boise won the Fiesta Bowl essentially because they took an entire month and installed a new offense? However, I think Boise beats Bama, mostly because I don’t think Bama deals with sophistication on offense very well. This could have set up a Boise-TCU national title game, which causes the TV people to all kill themselves. I think TCU wins that game unless their ginger QB’s gags on a chicken bone again.
If neither TCU nor Boise get in, it’s Cincy in the 3 slot and Florida in the 4 slot in a quick rematch of the SEC title game. I’ll take Urban in that rematch, Texas over Cincy and a Florida-Texas national title game. Give me Urban over Mack Brown every day and twice on Sunday.
Tomorrow: The 2010 TCU Horned Frogs.