THE WHOLE THING IS A LIE. A SCRIPT.
And so the high priests of the College Football Playoff, cloistered in their boardroom temple in Grapevine, Texas, have descended from their mountain of money to grace us peasants with their fifth stone tablet of rankings. And they want you to believe it’s real. They want you to see Ohio State at #1, Indiana at #2, and Georgia at #3 and think, ‘Wow, what a horse race!’ Don’t be a fool. This isn’t a race. It’s a pre-written television drama, and we’re just being fed the second-act plot twist designed to keep us hooked before the predictable, soul-crushing finale where the popular kids win. Again. Because this entire system, this cabal that calls itself a ‘selection committee,’ is the most transparently corrupt institution in American sports, and that’s saying something.
Let’s not mince words. Indiana at number two is a lie. It’s a beautiful, temporary, wonderfully fraudulent lie. It’s the carrot they dangle in front of you to make you believe in fairness, to make you believe that a team outside the established aristocracy can actually crash the party. But it’s a mirage. The committee had to put them there. They had no choice. An undefeated record from a Power Five conference, even one they clearly disdain, is impossible to ignore at this stage without sparking a full-scale revolution. So they play their part. They smile for the cameras, talk about Indiana’s ‘complete body of work,’ and they place them at the #2 spot as a placeholder. A sacrificial lamb being fattened for the slaughter that is Championship Weekend.
THE GEORGIA SAFETY NET AND THE SEC SICKNESS
But right there, lurking at #3, is their safety net. Their true love. Their darling. Georgia. A team with a loss. A team that already failed its biggest test of the season but is still positioned perfectly, just waiting. Waiting for Indiana to slip up, to lose a nail-biter in their conference title game, so the committee can perform its sacred duty. And what is that duty? To protect the brand. To ensure the semifinal matchups generate the highest possible television ratings for their broadcast partners at ESPN. An undefeated Indiana getting blown out by Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship will be spun as ‘proof’ they were never that good, and they’ll be dropped to #6 or #7 without a second thought. But what happens when Georgia gets smashed by an SEC West opponent in their own title game? Oh, that’s a ‘quality loss.’ A ‘testament to the strength of their conference.’ They’ll drop, what, one spot? Maybe to #4? It’s a joke. An absolute clown show of hypocrisy we see play out year after year.
Because the sickness at the heart of this sport is the unshakeable, fanatical belief that the Southeastern Conference is operating on a different plane of existence. The 14-team protection racket that holds the entire sport hostage. A loss for an SEC team is a badge of honor. A loss for anyone else is a fatal character flaw. This committee isn’t judging teams; it’s judging logos. They see that ‘G’ on the helmet and they swoon. They see ‘IU’ and they see a nuisance, an accounting error that needs to be corrected before the final books are closed.
A COMMITTEE OF PUPPETS AND CORPORATE STOOGES
And who are these people making the decisions? Do you think it’s a room full of grizzled football scholars, breaking down film with the wisdom of Sun Tzu? Get real. It’s a collection of athletic directors with deep-seated conference allegiances, retired coaches looking for a paycheck, and corporate yes-men and women whose primary skill is nodding when a television executive speaks. Their job isn’t to find the four best teams. Their job is to find the four most profitable teams. The four most marketable teams. They don’t care about football. They care about demographics. They care about TV markets and alumni donor bases. They are the board of directors for a multi-billion-dollar entertainment product, and they will protect their most valuable assets at all costs. Ohio State is an asset. Georgia is an asset. Alabama, Notre Dame, Texas—all assets. Indiana? They’re a liability. An anomaly. A bug in the code that must be patched out.
They’ll use their made-up metrics to do it. The ones they conveniently emphasize or ignore depending on the team in question. One week, ‘strength of schedule’ is the holy grail. The next, when it helps their preferred team, it’s all about the ‘eye test.’ Then it’s ‘game control,’ a meaningless phrase that allows them to reward a team for beating a nobody by 40 points while punishing another for winning a tough conference game by 10. It’s a shell game. They move the peas around, dazzle you with jargon and nonsense, but the outcome is always the same: the house wins. And the house is the established, blue-blood order.
WE’VE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE
This isn’t speculation; it’s history. Just ask TCU in 2014, who was ranked #3 in the penultimate rankings, won their final game 55-3, and was dropped to #6 for no logical reason other than the committee wanted Ohio State instead. Ask the undefeated UCF teams that were never, ever given a shred of respect, laughed out of the room because the logo on their helmet wasn’t expensive enough. The system isn’t broken. This is the system working exactly as its corporate overlords designed it. It’s an exclusionary club with a velvet rope, and teams like Indiana are left standing in the cold, no matter what they do on the field.
So as we head into this final week, don’t watch the conference championship games as sporting events. Watch them for what they are: the final auditions for a scripted reality show. Watch as the commentators and analysts, all paid by the same companies that profit from the Playoff, begin laying the narrative groundwork for Indiana’s demise and Georgia’s salvation. They’re not analysts; they’re propagandists. They are preparing you, conditioning you to accept the injustice that is about to happen. And when Indiana loses a heartbreaker, the machine will kick into high gear. The narrative will shift instantly. ‘They were a great story, but…’ ‘They just didn’t have the championship pedigree…’ ‘Their schedule was weak all along…’ It will be a swift and brutal execution, sanctioned by the committee and cheered on by the media that serves it.
The only rational response is to reject the entire premise. Stop caring. Stop treating these rankings as legitimate. It’s all bread and circuses. A loud, flashy, multi-million-dollar distraction meant to sell you trucks, beer, and a fraudulent version of a sport that died a long time ago. The moment they took the championship out of the hands of objective polls and computers—flawed as they were—and put it into a backroom with a group of conflicted, agenda-driven humans, it was over. This is the result. A weekly pageant of lies. And this week’s lie is that Indiana has a chance. They don’t. They never did.
