By BRUCE LOWITT
Long Island University’s shocking 5-3 championship victory over equally surprising Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College that concluded the first 512-team 2029-30 College Football Playoff, has coaches and athletic directors from stronger football programs – which is to say virtually all of them – rethinking the season-long playoff expansion.
“We knew that this would eliminate the need for conference championships,” Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti said, “but we oversold ourselves on the idea that every game from first to last would be a playoff game and that every game would be so meaningful as to attract sellout crowds and major television ratings.
It turned out that while the Ohio States and Notre Dames and Georgias were knocking each other off, some of the smaller schools like LIU and SMWC were avoiding just enough losses against major colleges, or upsetting one or two, to stay alive in the year-long playoff.
“And despite that,” Petitti said, “they weren’t selling out their stadiums, some of which seat only a few thousand fans, plus nobody gave a shit about watching games between schools nobody’d ever heard of … including every member of the playoff committee.”
That, and the fact that no school could know where and against whom it would would be playing after the first weekend, threw a monkey wrench in the whole process. With every college, regardless of size, in the 512-team bracket, the second week’s games, and every week’s games thereafter, depended on whether they won or lost the prior week.
“How are we supposed to scout who we’re going to play next when we can’t even find them on a fucking map,” Alabama coach Kalen DeBoar bitched after the Crimson Tide was upset by Mount Mercy University and Presbyterian College in the playoffs’ first two rounds.
So the number of winners were 256 after the first week, 128 after the second, and so on, down to two teams after eight weeks, those survivors playing for the championship. The losing teams each week slid into a separate bracket and played each other, generally based on conferences.
That’s how, in the winner’s bracket, LIU Coach Ron Cooper’s Sharks, who play their home games in 6,000-seat Bethpage Federal Credit Union Stadium in Brookville, N.Y., wound up playing for the CFP title against Coach Blaine Powell’s Pomeroys, an NAIA team that plays its home games in 800-seat on-campus McMahon Field in Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana.
“I’d say we were lucky to play the Bruins in the quarterfinals the week after UCLA was beaten by the other Bruins,” LIU quarterback Ethan Greenwood said, referring to George Fox University’s Division III team in Newburg, Oregon.
UCLA was so disappointed after that loss that, as coach Bob Chesney put it, “the guys just spent the next week drowning their sorrow in beer, trying to get laid, and never got up for practice, so pretty much how they spent the week before the game.”
SMWC “never played before a crowd of more than seven thousand people in the Midwest Sprint Football League going into this year,” Saint Mary’s Coach Powell said, “and had to deal with sixty-something thousand people at Iowa. Those Hawkeyes players spent the first half laughing at us and the rest of the game trying to catch up.”
“But what I think rattled my boys the most and caused the last-minute safety that cost us the title was playing for it in The Big House in Michigan,” Powell added. “I mean, yeah, it has like a hundred and seven thousand seats, but playing in front of, I don’t know, maybe five-hundred fans, it was like a ghost town. Echoes. Wind whistling through the empty stands and tunnels. Rattled my kids big time. I mean, spooky.”
Coach Cooper said he’d take his champion Sharks on a victory tour to visit places most of them have never been before, starting with the historic Brooklyn Paramount Theater on LIU’s downtown campus, and across the street to Junior’s Restaurant and Bakery.
“I don’t think any of these kids have ever tasted real cheesecake,” Cooper said. “And pastrami? Fuggetaboutit!”
