For as long as we can remember, there is something about turning the page to the new year and a sport that has been ingrained in Saturday Americana for what is now a century & a half. Sure, the sport of college football has changed quite considerably in the course of the past several decades: conference alignment pushing traditions aside for more money, universities taking advantage of that financial reward in a landscape where the highest hierarchy of the NCAA has often frowned upon student athletes being paid, and many other intricacies that put college athletics in the front page for things that happen outside the courts and fields.
But when you get to the heart of it, it's on the field where it all counts. And once the calendar turned to December, so began the assortment of the many bowl games which punctuate a college football season that began in the heat of summer. They are, in essence, exhibition games that give teams with a decent record a reward at season's end to relax in its host city, and play in front of a national TV audience with NFL draft prospects as well. But once the last weekend of 2019 came, so began the juicy stuff: the College Football Playoff and the New Year's Six -- the Cotton, Orange, Rose, Sugar, Fiesta and Peach -- which, on an annual rotating basis, serve as semifinals to determine who plays for the National Championship, and the fourth iteration of college football holding a true championship game in the only sport in the entire NCAA system not governed by the collegiate bureaucracy, and thus not have the same kind of sanctioned national championship as their basketball counterparts.
The 2019 college football season marked the 150th anniversary of the first college football game between Princeton and Rutgers that took place in 1869, and this season began back in August with Florida beating Miami and Auburn beating Oregon in a split week of opening games before Labor Day. Off the field, laws were altered in college athletes' battle for compensation and for fair pay for play, while Missouri and Ole Miss paid the price with probation being handed down for off-field violations, and UConn flee to the Big East. But as always, the attention was on the field where Clemson, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Louisiana State and Oregon won the conference titles of the Power Five conferences (SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, PAC-12), while Georgia and Wisconsin were the victims of major upsets as were Central Florida when their nation-leading 25-game winning streak was snapped, and Nick Saban's Alabama faltered in the annual Iron Bowl against Auburn.For this season's College Football Playoff postseason, top-ranked LSU was matched with Oklahoma in the Peach Bowl and the first semifinal in Atlanta, while Ohio State and defending national champion Clemson faced off in Phoenix in the other semi of the Fiesta Bowl. In both games, the two teams whose nickname of Tigers would win those battles - the ladder in a thriller, to then go up against one another in the CFP National Championship Game in New Orleans at the Superdome, the home of the Sugar Bowl. On Monday, LSU and Clemson faced off in that national championship, and on the back of an impressive performance by Heisman Trophy winner Joe Burrow, his Tigers bested the defending champions 42-25 for its fourth consensus national championship and first since 2007, all the while completing an undefeated perfect season along the way.
Louisiana State University is located in the state capital of Baton Rouge, a 75-minute drive north along I-10 from New Orleans, and as it was when the Tigers won their last two national crowns in '07 and '04 (a disputed split national title with USC during the maligned era of the Bowl Championship Series) this year's National Championship amounted to a mere home game for those by the Bayou. The state capital is also home to two of those who've made their marks on The Challenge in recent years as both a regular and a special guest athlete, and a third member of the MTV family also has experience covering the Tigers along the sidelines at Tiger Stadium during the football season.
