With Clemson’s first-ever home win as a top-ranked team in the bag, many fans of the program have exhaled—and for good reason. Most of the hard work is over. The toughest games are in the rear view mirror.
Catch phrases like “the only team that can beat Clemson is Clemson” remain to define what’s left of the Tigers’ 2015 season. Syracuse, Wake Forest, South Carolina—there really isn’t much to get concerned about in any of those three programs.
The only thing standing in the way of Clemson’s first trip to the College Football Playoff is an intangible, hidden, silent, powerful enemy. In fact, this oft-referenced enemy is actually difficult to describe in a word.
It isn’t really fear, or nervousness, or inconsistency, or unfamiliarity, or bewilderment. It’s actually some combination of all of those things, and the best way I can describe it is to share a story from the Bible.
Long story short, Jesus walks out onto water to meet His disciples during a storm. One of His disciples—Peter—steps out of the boat and starts walking on the water toward Jesus. Peter gets right near Jesus and promptly freaks out since, you know, he’s standing on water. When he realizes what he’s doing, Peter starts to sink.
Here’s the point: Clemson is doing things it doesn’t really ever do. This season has been abnormally successful, and sometimes teams whose achievements surpass general expectations stumble when they recognize the reality of where they are and how improbable it is that they can actually achieve at that level.
There are examples of teams choking away opportunities at the top of the polls late in the season littered throughout the history of college football. Many times, those teams lost to unranked opponents that had no real skin in the game, so to speak.
This is the time of year where media types warn fan bases about overlooking weaker opponents because sometimes the pressure of playing games in November with everything to lose can be overwhelming. There’s a difference between that pressure affecting outcomes in theory and in practice, however, and it’s an important distinction to make.
The BCS era was a goldmine for these supposed flops because of the abstract nature of the system. Computers largely decided the fates of the top teams in the country, so no one really ever knew if a result would be good enough. At least the playoff system features people making decisions, so many of those concerns go away.
Last November, in six weeks’ worth of action, four teams ranked in the committee’s top four lost. One of them—Mississippi State—actually accounted for two of those four defeats.
Out of those four losses, only one featured an unranked team beating a potential playoff team. Other than Auburn’s loss at home to Texas A&M, the other defeats are all reasonable. There was no mass upheaval. There was no chaos.
Basically, the November wipeouts so common throughout the BCS era did not carry over to the new playoff system in year one. Maybe they will reemerge this year, but the stability added to the process by replacing computers with rational observers might be enough to shield the top of the food chain from plummeting.
More specifically, the kind of pressure that might cause Clemson to falter to teams like Syracuse, Wake Forest, or South Carolina could be simply a figment of our collective imagination.
God Bless!
WQ