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What’s on tap for Monday night’s National College Division

By Arnie Leshin
Let’s get right to the subject at hand, the heavily favored top-ranked, undefeated Georgia taking on Texas Christian University, the interloper of this year’s national college Division I Football Championship.
 
Granted the Horned Frogs, an early-line 14-point underdog, might not win the title that no one — well, almost no one — even expected them to be on the field for when the game is played Monday night at So-Fi Stadium, home of the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams in Inglewood.
 
No matter, the private school out of Fort Worth, Texas, has earned its way there, and now has given this tilt something it desperately needed. Variety. 
 
Face it, the last thing we needed was another rematch of teams from the same conference. 
 
Says TCU head coach Sonny Dykes: “I’m not that much for clichés, but I’ve always  believed that the cream rises and the more opportunities that schools outside of the traditional bra nds get, the more those schools can become traditional brands.”
 
The four-team College Football Playoff (CFP) has been largely monopolized by an exclusive cabal of powerful programs during its first eight years. 
 
No argument there. Alabama has played in the championship game a whopping six times, Clemson has reached the final four times, Ohio State and Georgia were two-time finalists before this season. The only other schools to make it this far were Oregon in the initial year of the playoff, and LSU, which capped its dominating 2019 campaign by hoisting the championship trophy. 
 
Most annoying of all, a pair of national title showdowns were simply do-overs of Southeastern Conference championship contests between the Crimson Tide and the Bulldogs. 
 
Great for the SEC, not so much for the rest of the nation. 
 
Now comes this one and it highlights defending champion Georgia, and who are dem Horned Frogs, and who are technically part of the Power Five group of conferences that rule the sport but sure feels like and outsider.
Personally, I feel it’s great to have a new face, and not only it is a new face, but its story and what it had to do to get here. 
 
So let’s get to the chase and realize what Dykes’ team has accomplished this season, going from unranked at the start of the year to becoming the first Big 12 school to win a playoff game and thus earn a shot at this championship. Yes, it has become a vagabond in this era of conference alignment.
 
It’s nice to see this turnaround, especially when TCU was tossed from its long-time home when the SEC collapsed in the 1990s. Jilted by an expanded Big 12, the Horned Frogs bounced from the Western Athletic Conference to Conference USA to the Mountain West Conference in search of a stable home.
 
Then, after initially accepting an invite to move again, to the Big East, Texas Christian was in the Mountain West and trying to get respect from people around the country, sort of like a small school getting a big deal, and it wound up jumping instead to the Big 12 when that league was desperate for new members to ensure its survival, finally came calling in 2012.
 
The Horned Frogs happily answered the call. 
Now man, it just doesn’t seem that long that TCU was in the Mountain West and trying to get some respect, now it arrived. That came after the 2010 season when these Horned Frogs, in the Mountain West, went 13-0 and ranked second in the national rankings. 
 
Who knows what that might have been if the playoff had come along sooner? Except that was when the BCS era, when only two schools got an opportunity to play for the title and the big boys weren’t about to let a Mountain West team storm their club. Not being selfish, just realistic.
 
So it was that Arizona went on to defeat Oregon in the championship game while TCU had to be content with a Rose Bowl victory over Wisconsin. That was then, now was when the Horned Frogs, after six tight tests of which they won five, were selected for the playoffs despite an overtime loss to Big 12 rival Kansas State, which was also their lone defeat.
 
That put the focus squarely on No. 1 Georgia’s bid to repeat as champion and the possibility Big 12 foes Michigan and Ohio State could meet in the title game not long after the Wolverines came from a 25-23 halftime deficit in Columbus to rout the Buckeyes, 51-27, which put Michigan at No. 2 in the rankings and Ohio State at No. 4. 
 
That scenario fell apart when the unbeaten Wolverines were knocked off by TCU in the Fiesta Bowl semifinal of the playoffs’ Final Four, and the Bulldawgs did their part with a stirring final-whistle one-point win over the Buckeyes. Yup, hours after the TCU-Michigan game had ended, the other game concluded at midnight at the same time the New Year’s Eve ball was dropping at Times Square. 
championship.
“No doubt we were kind of surprised after seeing the result of the earlier game,” said Georgia head coach Kirby Smart, “and that’s when we became well concerned over our next game.”
Hearing that, welcome Horned Frogs, give it your best. You heard the man, you’re there, now deal with it.
Smart went on, “Listen, this is a very good team,” he said, “we’re meeting up with. They are good on both sides of the ball and play with total confidence. We’ve gone through films and more films of them, we looked a lot through their game against Michigan, forget the odds, prepare instead for an expected tough tussle.”
 
Now on the other hand, if you’re really taking a poll with Georgia fans, they obviously don’t know a whole lot about Texas Christian. And to me, that’s fun because they’re not going to back down, I assure you, and they are incredibly confident, and I myself think it’s going to be a great game. 
 
“There’s a lot of good football teams that deserve to be in the playoffs,” Dykes says, “and if you exclude them, it’s hard to break in.”
 
His voice rose with excitement as he looked ahead to a playoff expanded three-fold. Until then, another round of applause for TCU, for the Horned Frogs already made this playoff a winner.

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