Thoughts on College Football's Last Bowl Week and NFL Week 17

1. Best of the Week

Best Game: The Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl (tie)

It really sucks that the College Football Playoffs came about during one of the most consolidated periods of college football. For too many years the games were decided by more than three touchdowns and it was a snoozefest. Well, not this year. The Rose Bowl delivered a sloppy but fun game between the two all-time winningest programs. God said it was too much fun and we should get extra football and it went to overtime. In New Orleans, the shootout was amazing, with Quinn Ewers battling injury valiantly but Michael Penix Jr. being even better. What a night of college football we were given to start the year.

Best Player: CeeDee Lamb (WR) - Cowboys

I know the game ended horribly (we will get to that), but you can't deny the impact that the next great Cowboys' 88 had on the game. Moving Lamb into the slot more has unlocked him. It used to be that short receivers owned the slot, but Lamb showed comfort there at Oklahoma, running stick routes and crossers to great success. Lamb has that ability to just be a playmaker; the route doesn't have to be crisp, the ball can be thrown poorly and off a scramble drill, and he can take it 92 yards for a touchdown, as he did Saturday. 

Best Uniform: The Rose Bowl

Sunset at the #RoseBowl…perfection. pic.twitter.com/mkWU1cK3eb

— Rose Bowl Game (@rosebowlgame) January 2, 2024

If you did a Mount Rushmore of settings of US sports, the Rose Bowl is definitely on it and probably battles Augusta National for first overall pick in the draft. The neon sign, the mountains, the grass, the way SoCal captures the American imagination like no other place, it's perfect. Throw in Alabama, the school with the most national championships, and Michigan, the all-time wins leader in college football, and my goodness. The Winged Helmets, the Rose Bowl patches, the White and Crimson, it was perfect. 

2. Make Bowl Games Like March Madness

Football is THE sport in this country. Viewership towers over all others. One advantage it has is that most games all take place on the same day. You aren't checking the schedule to see what night your team is playing most weeks, you're just checking to see if it's a noon game or later in the day. But during the bowl season, that cadence goes out the window at the same time that most people were identifying with this meme:

The early bowl season was awesome. Between December 16th and December 28th there were ten games decided by a single score and other games like Kansas-UNLV, Georgia Tech-UCF, Louisville-USC, and Air Force-James Madison that were back and forth before having a scoring margin larger than 8 points. But these games were at random times, sporadically spaced out like the schedules of other sports.

Flash forward to Saturday, when Georgia beat the breaks off of Florida State and the internet exploded with how broken the bowl season is and how terrible college football has become. I know the portal and opt outs contributed to the score, but the Dawgs beat TCU by two more points in the natty last year and you can't tell me the Horned Frogs didn't care about that game. My question is, would it have made this much noise if there were other games you could have turned on, like a normal college football Saturday?

Put all the bowl games besides the playoffs on a weekend, a Thursday-Saturday explosion of pigskin euphoria. If you think people won't watch, did you care about Davidson before Steph Curry lit up Georgetown or Oral Roberts before they pulled off the 15-2 upset in the tourney? There are bad games in the NCAA Tourney, but we block those out for Northern Iowa hitting a 3 to knock out Kansas. A lot of games happen in the same venues in Tampa and Orlando, space those games out. You could even pick the weekend after finals for all the non-playoff games so that players don't have to opt out to transfer to make sure they can align with their new school's semester start. College football is a messed up system, but rather than suggest unreal wholesale solutions, I think this Band-Aid would make the current system a lot more fun.

3. The NFL Needs Full Time Refs

The end of the Lions-Cowboys game on Saturday night was inexcusable. Video shows Taylor Decker talking to the referee before the play. I would guess he said something about being eligible and not asking which steakhouse in Arlington is the best. Mistakes happen, the refs have an impossible job, and the rulebook has exploded into chaos where no one understands what catching a football even means anymore. But with everyone watching these games and all this money being bet with these gambling apps, these primetime blunders look terrible. It would be awesome to be a partner at a law firm and then on the weekends stand on the field of Jerry World. But the NFL needs referees who only have one job.

4. What is the Next Evolution?

At any given point, there are only ten Top 10 quarterbacks in the NFL. That is the unfortunate limitation of the number. So 22 teams have to win with something else. The last 5 years have been about the Shanahan-McVay scheme of outside zone and rhythm passing. When things are on time, it is beautiful (see: Dolphins 70, Broncos 20). But the top defenses have caught up and can be multi-faceted and physical to disrupt the timing that is critical to the passing game in these offenses (see: Ravens 56, Dolphins 19). 

Football is a cat and mouse game, where the offense gets ahead and the defense catches up; it never stops. What is the next move now that these defenses have caught up? We already talked earlier in the year about more gap blocking happening in the run game. Teams are moving top receivers into the slot to get them away from press man coverage. What else is going to happen? I bet a lot of coaches will be in the lab this off-season ready to figure it out.

5. Play of the Week

Michigan's redzone offense this year has been Blake Corum surging through the middle to score endless amounts of touchdowns. If not beautiful, it is efficient. But for the Wolverine's first touchdown of the Rose Bowl, they used him as a receiver. Usually if they throw to a back, it is Donovan Edwards. Let's see how they used a different personnel and formation to fool the Crimson Tide for 6.

• Michigan sets up with a bunch including their tight end (dot 1) opposite of Corum (dot 2). Alabama puts a corner on the top man of the bunch and the edge player is hyper aware of the tight end because he doesn't want to get blocked outside (dot 3).
• The bunch does a great job of pushing a corner off of press man as Kool-Aid McKinstry (dot 4) has to sit off while the other corner (dot 6) can press. Bunches usually lead to a lot of routes that cross each other and if all the defenders were at the line they would get caught up. When I first saw the formation, I thought the tight end was going to leak to the flat.
• Alabama's linebacker (dot 5) is in man coverage for Corum, but likely thinks it will either be a run or Corum will block, as he has done all season.

• All of the receivers in the bunch come off the line and run inward breaking routes, causing the defenders to all step into the middle of the formation (dot 1).
• Corum (dot 2) steps into the middle of the line, looking like he is going to block, but he is actually going to come through the line and across the formation to run a flat route to the wide side of the field. The linebacker (dot 3) is supposed to cover him.

• Corum (dot 1) is into his route and wide open. You can see the linebacker (dot 2) is looking backwards. Often, the way to stop pick routes is to pass off receivers as they cross. As he saw Corum cross, he likely thought a defensive back would be there and he would take a crosser coming the other way. But all of the defenders over the bunch went with the bunch receivers. Likely because they didn't consider Corum a receiving threat like they did the receivers and tight end. It's amazing scheme / personnel pairing to mess with the defenders.

• Easy walk-in 6, vastly different than an inside run he is used to. An awesome call and the easiest touchdown of the day in a hard fought game.