Why do we watch sports?
I’ll tell you why.
TCU 51 Michigan 45
Georgia 42 Ohio State 41
Those were the the games played last weekend to determine the matchup for the national championship of college football.
The one thing sports has over everything else is the unscripted live human drama that plays out until a winner is declared.
It is unpredictable.
It is emotional.
It is performed before huge crowds of supporters for each side, screaming with delight, or crushed in despair.
Just think of it.
A film is rehearsed and shot over and over from many angles.
A stage play is also rehearsed and while it is live, it is repeated continually.
A musical show is planned and comes off that way.
You name anything we witness for sheer entertainment.
It’s set up and delivered. And that’s a good thing.
But not sports.
Sports is a blank canvas that becomes filled with moments that may be wonderful, and moments that are not so wonderful.
The kind of moments we saw in those two thrilling back-to-back games played in Atlanta and Phoenix had the complete package.
The Sugar Bowl, and the Fiesta Bowl were the two main attractions.
The College Football Playoff was established by college sports officials and television execs to present the ultimate in drama featuring the four best teams playing one after another in semi-final games.
But until this season, it really hasn’t been that way.
Sure, there have been championship contests matching up the two survivors who waged titanic battles.
However, we haven’t seen great games setting up the title pairing, like we have in the NFL, when conference finals to decide who advances to the Super Bowl often have been better than the Super Bowl itself.
We also have not seen Cinderella teams, those outside the obvious powers, earn a spot in college football’s Final Four, and prove to be a legitimate threat.
Last year, Cincinnati unexpectedly played their way into the magic quartet, but proved not trouble for Alabama.
The complaint with the current format has been the fact that the same old dominant schools appear every year in the playoffs.
We all know that they do because they recruit the best high school players.
Of course that may be changing now that there is the existence of the transfer portal which allows talented players to move to another school, and be eligible the next season.
In essence that brings free agency into the college sports picture, something that only the pro leagues had in place.
If a player has talent but is not getting playing time, which is common, he can jump to where he’ll thrive, at another school.
This season things have changed. And changed for the better.
A school not rated in the pre-season top 25, and not even getting any votes outside that list, played well enough during the campaign to earn a spot in the national semi-finals.
That school is TCU.
TCU, is Texas Christian University, located in Fort Worth, Texas.
They have been members of the Big 12 Conference since 2012, and were rated no better than #6 in their own conference pre-season rankings.
They have had many outstanding seasons in the past, including a perfect year in 2010.
The head coach who guided them to 10 seasons of 11 or more victories is Gary Patterson, who was replaced in 2022, by Sonny Dykes who moved crosstown from SMU, in Dallas.
TCU, which has one of the more lovable nicknames in the nation, the Horned Frogs, were 5-7 in 2021.
Thus, the coaching change.
This year, the Horned Frogs came out of nowhere to win 11 straight games, to earn a spot in the College Football Playoff.
They remained in that charmed circle, even though they lost their only game, a 31-28 showdown to Kansas State, in the Big 12 conference title matchup.
TCU had beaten K-State during the season, and their 11-1 record was still sufficient to keep them in the championship run.
Georgia, has been the national #1, all year, and Michigan and Ohio State rounded out the other national title contenders.
The Wolverines finished the regular season undefeated, including a second-straight beat down of their fierce rivals Ohio State, turning what had been an ugly trend for Michigan of continual losses to the Buckeyes.
Ohio State “eked” back into the playoffs, beating out Alabama.
TCU was not given much of a chance against Michigan and their formidable defense, one of the finest in the country.
The Wolverines allowed a little more than 13 points per game in 2022, and the most scored against them in a game was 27.
But it was TCU’s defense which gave them an early spark, with the first of two interceptions returned for touchdowns, Pick 6 is the popular term, and before you knew it, the underdogs from Fort Worth had a 14-0 first quarter lead.
At halftime the lead was 21-6, certainly enough time for the Wolves to get back into it.
And in fact they did.
Ten consecutive points in the third, brought Michigan to within five, but when TCU scored two TD’s in less than a minute-and-a-half, Cinderella was on the scene in all her glory.
The Big Ten champions were never out of it as the two teams battled dramatically in the final quarter.
Michigan got to within 51-45 with three-and-a-half to go, but TCU held on and won the thriller.
It was a high-scoring affair, marked by sensational scoring plays by both squads.
It was a breathless contest won by a team that no one had figured would get to this point.
There was little chance the next semi-final could equal what the first game had.
But it did. And it surpassed it.
Number One Georgia was facing an Ohio State team that had to consider itself fortunate in winding up as the fourth entry in the playoff.
They had lost to arch-rival Michigan and were the clear underdogs to the……Dogs!
It was the ultimate opportunity for redemption for the Buckeyes who were the first to take charge, opening up a 21-7 lead early in the second quarter.
But Georgia stormed back, to no one’s surprise and tallied 17 unanswered points to lead 24-21, before Ohio State re-took the lead by four into intermission.
A touchdown and a field goal had OSU up by 14 heading into the fourth.
The Bulldogs, led by a quarterback with a name that belongs atop the list of those in the social stratosphere, rallied once again.
Stetson Bennett IV, who threw three touchdown passes and ran for another, connected on a 76-yard play and a two-point conversion to make it a three-point Ohio State lead with nine minutes remaining.
The Buckeyes led by six, when Bennett struck again with a TD toss with under a minute to go, and Georgia had a one-point lead.
All Ohio State needed was a field goal to provide the second shocker of the day, but a 50-yard try was way off the mark and Georgia had won a heart-stopper.
So now it comes down to the final match up. The number one powerhouse Georgia vs the outsider TCU.
What’s better?
The point of it all, is not to simply re-cap the highlights of two exciting college football games with so much at stake.
Although we’ve done some of that.
There is really too much to go over.
The point is, at the end of the day, actually well into the night, you had to sit back and exhale, and savor the athletic show, delivered by four high-level teams, the kind of entertainment that really only comes in the world of sports.
Live human drama, with no script, playing out, ending with a winner and a loser.
Last weekend, we had two of them.