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ALDLAND Delivers the Official 2025 College Football Playoff Rankings

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Unlike the College Football Playoff Committee with respect to the selection of the College Football Playoff field and rankings, I am willing to declare both that I am biased and the precise nature of my bias. In that regard, I am biased, and my bias is that I am opposed to the College Football Playoff Committee itself. To be sure, that bias is not one recently or hastily adopted but, instead, long-held and deep-seated. My public writings dating back to 2013 confirm the fortitude of my bias.

With that noble acknowledgement decreed, I present ALDLAND’s final 2025 College Football Playoff rankings for purposes of playoff seeding:

  1. Indiana
  2. Georgia
  3. Ohio State
  4. Texas Tech
  5. Vanderbilt
  6. Texas A&M
  7. Ole Miss
  8. Oregon
  9. Oklahoma
  10. Miami
  11. Notre Dame
  12. Texas

The reasoning behind these rankings ought to be fairly obvious, but I will add a note regarding the Group of Five’s total exclusion: I acknowledge that the prior exclusion of arguably worthy representatives of the Group of Five from the formal contesting of the national championship under previous regimes was a significant driver of the change to the expanded-playoff format, that did not and does not now mean that there is at least one such worthy representative every year, and there is no such worthy representative this year.

Analyzing college football coaches’ favorite musical artists

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bruce-springsteen-slide-super-bowl-halftime-show

ESPN conducted a survey of all 128 Division I college football coaches, asking them to name their favorite musical artist. The full list of responses is here. My cursory analysis is here:   Continue reading →

2013 college football bowl schedule

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Before getting to the 2013-14 college football bowl schedule and associated predictions and operations, a note on sponsored discourse. In this post-Musburger-for-all-the-Tostitos world, it is an unremarkable fact that the bowl games are not merely sponsored football contests but business entities in and of themselves, the sponsorship-style nomenclature– e.g., “the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl”– a mere reflection of the game’s less overtly monied past. Even the ostensible bastion of postseason intercollegiate purity now is known as “the Rose Bowl Game presented by Vizio.”

When a bowl game is a business, and not merely a happening, there is an associated shift in the commercial advertising language referential to that business. The NFL’s decision to prohibit the use of “Super Bowl” by non-league advertisers, who now must offer you late-January deals on new televisions for watching “the big game,” provides a rough analogy.

I understand and accept the logic behind a business’ desire to control its portrayal in other business’ advertisements and insist on inclusion of a game’s full, sponsored title in that portrayal. What I do not understand is why the news media plays along. This week, I heard a local sports talk show talk about talking about Georgia’s appearance in “the Taxslayer dot com Gator Bowl,” and that’s far from the only example. I understand that some of the sponsors have integrated their names into the bowl games’ names in such a way that it’s difficult– or, where the sponsor’s name and the bowl’s name are one and the same, impossible– to say the bowl’s name without saying the sponsor’s name as well (e.g., the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl and the Capital One Bowl, respectively). “Taxslayer dot com” is a mouthful, though, and everybody already knows the Gator Bowl. “The Rose Bowl Game presented by Vizio” is ridiculous to say, and things like “the Allstate Sugar Bowl,” “FedEx Orange Bowl,” and “Tostitos Fiesta Bowl” simply are superfluous. Why the sports news media feels obligated to append these sponsor names when discussing the bowls is beyond me, and you won’t find us doing it here, unless it’s something humorous like the Beef O’Brady Bowl or the RealOakFurniture.com Bowl.

Onto the bowl schedule, which begins this Saturday.   Continue reading →