Best CFP semifinal games ever? Connelly on Saturday’s chaos and what’s next

Bill Connelly is a staff writer for ESPN.com.

For a couple of decades, the NFL’s popularity skyrocketed despite its main event. In the 20 years from 1983 to 2002, we saw Super Bowls decided by scores of 38-9, 38-16, 46-10, 39-20, 42-10, 55-10, 37-24, 52-17, 30-13, 49-26, 35-21, 34-19, 34-7 and 48-21. In 40 combined NFC and AFC Championship Games in that span, 20 were decided by at least 17 points. The league has always aimed for parity, but we rarely saw evidence of that in its biggest games.

Be it in the NFL or college football’s lower levels, sometimes elimination games just get out of hand. One team gets on top, the other lets go of the rope a bit after a long season, and bad things happen.

Sometimes, however, you just have particularly good or bad stretches of games. It’s been a great stretch of late: In the past 19 seasons, the Super Bowl has given us 12 down-to-the-wire classics. All seven of last year’s quarterfinal-or-later playoff games were decided by three points or in overtime.

College football has always been an oligarchy ruled by a chosen few, so it probably isn’t a surprise that since the introduction of the College Football Playoff in 2014, we’ve seen some blowouts. In the CFP’s first eight seasons, we only really got a handful of classics, and an even smaller number of those games came in the semifinals. Maybe that’s the nature of the sport, but it was also just a bad stretch. We were due a couple of classics, and wow, did we get them Saturday.

First, TCU upset Michigan 51-45 in the Vrbo Fiesta Bowl in a game that featured one of the sport’s wildest quarters and a comeback bid that looked almost destined before a bad snap on the game’s final play. Then, before we could even get our heart rates back down, Georgia beat Ohio State 42-41 in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, completing the comeback that Michigan could not and surviving when Ohio State’s last second field goal went into the air in 2022 and sailed wide in 2023.

Now that we’ve had a moment to catch our collective breath, here are six takeaways from a wonderful pair of semis.

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