The 2020 Power 5 college football season ended with the Alabama Crimson Tide winning its 18th national title and seventh with head coach Nick Saban by defeating the Ohio State Buckeyes 52-24 in the national championship game.

When the season started weeks late and in an abridged format for most schools, the question was whether or not the season would actually finish, and before that it was whether or not a season would actually happen.

So yes, let’s take a moment to be thankful that despite COVID-19 protocols and outbreaks across the country that affected just about every program in the nation, a season did actually play out, even in abridged form. That’s no small feat given the size of these programs and how many coaches, staff and players are involved normally, now with added testing procedures and protocols to boot.

It was Herculean in many ways, and while many debate if it should have even happened, in many ways it was a needed release for a lot of us that brought back a sense of normalcy in a time that is anything but normal.

So now that it’s over, let’s talk turkey about where college football is for a bit in review.

Alabama is Alabama. They have their own tier in college football. The one that has seven national titles since 2009. No one is competing with that, not even Clemson or Ohio State.

If you talk to Michigan fans about it, and I’d be cautious of doing so, they’ll tell you it’s awful for college football and until the cheating gets reigned in, the College Football Playoff is just going to be the same 4 or 5 teams every year in Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, Oklahoma and Notre Dame, and that’s no good for the game.

They’re not wrong, but they’re still hitting the easy button with it, as are a lot of other college football programs in general.

We know what the elite schools do. Football factories we call them. Places where kids don’t go to “play school” like Cardale Jones famously said years ago en route to his short lived XFL future. Whether you cry “no evidence” or not, it’s all there and it’s like Malone from The Untouchables said: “The problem isn’t finding it. The problem is who wants to cross Capone.”

In this case, “Capone” is the SEC, and no the NCAA doesn’t want to cross them. Too much money involved.

Alright fine, that’s a problem…...but the rest of us are using it as a crutch for the bigger issues.

Take Michigan for example. In 2016 and 2017 they brought in back to back Top 5 recruiting classes without “going to the darkside.” In fact, more than a few people think they did in order to get the likes of Rashan Gary and Devin Bush to play in Ann Arbor, but Jim Harbaugh didn’t “let the hate flow through him,” he just got really creative the first two years and found a way to bring top flight talent to Michigan football.

Then he lost that creativity and has been mired in mediocrity ever since, until this past season when his team disastrously clunked its way to 2-4, missing two games because of COVID-19, including the annual Ohio State matchup.

What happened to Harbaugh that he was able to bring in Top 5 classes for two years and then became perennial Top 10? Was it really the influence of the elite programs? An uneven playing field? Kids that had no interest in playing school in Ann Arbor?

No, it was because he was losing games.

I mean sure, there’s plenty of cases where kids like Najee Harris and Alex Leatherwood, kids that Michgan recruited, are going to be swayed by the elite programs, but you don’t do yourself any favors with the rest of the top tier kids on the fence when you’re .500 against lowly Michigan State, wishy-washy Penn State, and now under .500 against a Wisconsin program that hasn’t recruited higher than upper 30’s in decades. In fact, I don’t know that they ever have recruited higher than that.

Kids want to play and they want to win. Bottom line. That’s what Alabama, Clemson and OSU are doing and have been doing for a number of years now, creating a system of continuity, high expectations and rich rewards. That’s the real factory aspect of it.

The problem is, the closest that any of the next tier non-elite teams have come to achieving this is Oklahoma and Notre Dame, and before you argue that Oklahoma is an elite program, I’ll ask you to point to their CFP National championship game appearances, let alone their national titles.

Exactly. Oklahoma is VERY good under Lincoln Riley and they’ve ruled the Big 12 in recent years, but you need to get to the title game at least for the “elite” conversation.

So you have Oklahoma ruling a conference with no defense that’s all air raid spread, and Notre Dame winning 11 to 12 games with a questionable schedule at best, but still getting that perceptive respect from the CFP at least twice in the last 3 years. Maybe Oklahoma has gone to the dark side with some of the talent they have, but Notre Dame? Doubtful.

If they can reach the CFP twice in the last three years, there’s no excuse for blue bloods like Michigan, Texas, USC, Georgia and Florida to name a few, to not be in that conversation, and the reason they aren’t isn’t all because Alabama, Clemson and OSU are “force choking” the field. It’s also because rather than be Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi, they’re content to be Luke at the end of Empire Strikes Back, with a chopped off hand, denying the truth of their situation, and screaming into the void as they fall down the Cloud City pit.

Since 2007 when Nick Saban was hired at Alabama, those aforementioned blue bloods have done the following:

MICHIGAN - Four under .500 seasons, no conference titles, 11-2 best record in 2011

USC - One under .500 season, a nearly decade gap between conference titles in 2008 and 2017, 11-3 best record in 2017

TEXAS - Four under .500 seasons, One national title game appearance in 2009, 10-4 best record since then

GEORGIA - One under .500 season, one conference title and national title game appearance in 2017, 13-2 best record in that same year

FLORIDA - Two under .500 seasons, one conference title and national title in 2008, 11-2 best record since 2009(twice in 2012 and 2019)

If you’re telling me that all of that for those five programs is their ceiling, given the money, resources and alumni they all have, and the fact that Notre Dame in the last 3 years, has gone to a place twice where only one of them(Georgia) has been ONCE ever, and that it’s because Alabama, Clemson and Ohio State keep them there by breaking the rules, I’m going to call BS on that. Sorry not sorry.

I can’t speak for the other four schools, but I’ll tell you the problem at Michigan is mindset. We are a mentally weak program right now and we can’t get out of our own way to accept the modern game because we are too busy romanticizing the glory days of Bo and the Ten Year War. We refuse to treat college football as the billion-dollar business that it is, because we still believe that “student-athlete” is a real thing, and that if we start calling these players “amateur athletes,” then we throw away our integrity in the process. Complete and utter lazy button BS.

As a result of this mindset, we underachieve. Heavily. There’s no reason Michigan shouldn’t be doing more than what Notre Dame has in the past few years, and schedule isn’t an excuse. Look at the Big Ten, it’s no juggernaut conference once you get past Ohio State. Same goes for the Big 12 and Texas and definitely for USC and the Pac-12, a conference that has only ever sent two schools(Oregon and Washington) to the CFP since it started.

Georgia and Florida have tougher roads being in the SEC, but if Auburn can find a way to beat Bama five times since Saban was hired, the Bulldogs and Gators should be able to figure it out once or twice.

The ultimate point here is that when it comes to the playing field and the future of the College Football Playoff, it’s a two-way street. Yes, it would be better if the playing field were more level, but it’s not and we’re just going to have to deal with it. Yes, it would be better if the CFP expanded to include more teams, but there’s no guarantee of that. It’s all only half of the equation at the end of the day.

The other half is these programs climbing out of the pit of mediocrity and holding up their end of the bargain competitively speaking. Michigan fans have no excuses to make about OSU’s unfair practices when we can’t even beat Michigan State, Penn State, Wisconsin, or in 2020’s case, Indiana. Four, five and six-loss seasons aren’t going to cut it for Texas, USC and Florida, and as for Georgia…...have Auburn teach you how to beat Saban every once in a while. Despite his trophy case, his teams can be beaten and have been at times. Time for you to figure it out.

That’s my takeaway right now on the future of college football after 2020. While so many fans and alumni are decrying the evil empire in Tuscaloosa winning yet another national title on a heavily tilted playing field, it’s time for a lot of us to swallow some pride and admit our programs aren’t doing nearly enough to even get to a point where we can rightfully complain about the tilted playing field.

Congrats to Alabama again, and thank you for beating the evil in Columbus. Somebody had to do it.