I haven't been happy with the post-season bowl games, as you can see here, but tonight's game is the perfect conclusions: undefeated Michigan vs. undefeated Washington.
It's more than having two undefeated teams, though that is certainly awesome.
The best part is that it's a classic Big Ten vs. Pac-12 clash, and one that would have decided the national title in any of the last 100 years.
If the BCS were still in effect, these are the teams that would have been selected for the national title. There were four undefeated teams; no one would have taken Liberty, and given that Florida State wasn't in the top four it's pretty certain they'd have been left out of the BCS final.
During the Bowl Alliance years, the Fiesta Bowl typically held the national championship—but the Rose Bowl still had the Big Ten and Pac-12 winners, and that's what we have now. The Fiesta Bowl would play 2nd fiddle, with FSU vs. Texas perhaps to stake a claim as runner-up.
And any year before that, when the bowl games were a hodge-podge of linkages between bowls and conferences, and there were scrambles to fill slots even before Thanksgiving, and sometimes a key team would lose and blow a hole in a bowl matchup—even then, the Rose Bowl was a certain thing, and it would have been Michigan vs. Washington and it would have decided the national title.
So here we are, on the brink of the 12-team Playoff that will forever make it less likely that the top two teams will end up playing each other, we can enjoy it happening one last time. And also one last time before the Pac-12 (formerly the Pac-10, and Pac-8, and the PCC) disbands forever or at least emerges in a completely different form. Washington is moving to the Big Ten, along with Oregon, UCLA, and USC, so many of the great Rose Bowl games of the past take place in conference play.
For now though, we have one last Rose Bowl—even if it's not called that—and one last classic matchup before college football completes its recent transformation into something new.
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