FAYETTEVILLE -- The first year of the College Football Playoff, with Arkansas Athletic Director Jeff Long serving as the selection committee chairman, conformed to expectations.
Four conference champions -- including defending national champion and lone FBS unbeaten Florida State -- made the first four-team playoff, and the lone Power 5 conference that did not have a championship game, the Big 12 with co-champs Baylor and TCU, sat just outside the playoff ticket window.
The playoff pairings -- Alabama vs. Ohio State in a sweet Sugar Bowl matchup and Florida State vs. Oregon in the Rose Bowl -- will assure that one of college football's blue bloods, or in the case of Oregon, one of its new bloods, will be crowned the first champion in the new format.
The wardrobe-changing Ducks of second-year Coach Mark Helfrich might not have the century-long pedigree of Alabama and Ohio State, or nearly four decades of greatness as the Seminoles do, but Oregon has won 105 games in the past 10 years.
That victory total is second among Power 5 conference teams in the past decade, behind Alabama (107). Florida State has 96 victories in that span. Ohio State has won the second-most games (108) on the field, but its 12 victories from 2010 were vacated by the NCAA for using ineligible players, including a 31-26 victory over Arkansas in the Sugar Bowl.
The Oregon-Florida State semifinal game in Pasadena, Calif., where the Seminoles won last year's title, marks the third time Heisman Trophy winners will square off in the postseason as Oregon quarterback Marcus Mariota meets Florida State's Jameis Winston, last year's winner.
Florida State, which won 11 consecutive bowl games under Coach Bobby Bowden from 1985 through 1995, will be aiming for its seventh consecutive bowl victory in the Rose Bowl. The Seminoles are 24-7-1 in bowl games since 1982.
The Sugar Bowl pits Alabama Coach Nick Saban and Ohio State's Urban Meyer, whose former Florida team split two SEC championship games against the Crimson Tide in 2008 and 2009 with the winner going on to win the BCS national championship.
Saban and Meyer have coached six of the past 11 national champions, with Saban winning one at LSU and three at Alabama and Meyer winning two at Florida.
"Probably I can't remember my address or phone number, but I could tell you probably every play in those games," said Meyer, who has been at Ohio State three seasons. "The 2008 game was just one of the great games in college football history, in my opinion, where evenly matched teams were going back and forth, back and forth.
"The second year, that was one of the best teams I've ever coached against, Alabama, and they handled us pretty good ... dominated the line of scrimmage on both sides. So a lot of respect for Alabama and their coaching staff."
Twelve of this season's 38 bowl games are named for a city or state rather than a corporate sponsor, and that includes the Texas Bowl, where Arkansas and Texas will tangle for the 78th time.
The Hogs and Longhorns are two of seven former Southwest Conference teams -- when the league was at nine teams at Arkansas' departure in 1991 -- to go bowling.
Arkansas State will make its fourth consecutive appearance in the GoDaddy.com Bowl, tying fellow Sun Belt member Louisiana-Lafayette's four-year streak in the New Orleans Bowl.
Texas is believed to hold the record for most consecutive trips to the same bowl when it reached the Cotton Bowl after every season from 1968-1973.
The SEC has 12 teams in the bowls, and nine of them are favored to win, with South Carolina, a 3-point underdog to Miami in the Independence Bowl; Texas A&M, a 3 1/2 point underdog to West Virginia in the Liberty Bowl; and Ole Miss, a 3 1/2 point underdog to TCU in the Peach Bowl, the exceptions.
The Big Ten is an underdog in all 10 of its bowl games, including all four of its matchups against the SEC. The Big Ten went 2-5 in bowl games last year, the worst record among the Power 5 leagues.
The SEC was 7-3 in the postseason last year, best among the top conferences, despite Auburn losing to Florida State in the final BCS Championship Game and Alabama falling to Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl.
The Pac-12 went 6-3 in bowl games a year ago, while the Atlantic Coast Conference was 5-6 and the Big 12 was 3-3.
The nation's winningest FBS team in the past decade -- Boise State -- is back in the big-game arena with a Fiesta Bowl pairing against Arizona in the Wildcats' home state. The Broncos have won 112 games since 2005, tops in the FBS.
Boise State Coach Bryan Harsin, who led Arkansas State to the GoDaddy.com Bowl in his only season with the Red Wolves last year, has the Broncos in their third Fiesta Bowl since 2006, the year they burst onto the national scene with a 43-42 victory over Oklahoma in one of the more memorable games ever played.
Ole Miss will be the only FBS team to close the season where it began when it faces TCU in the Peach Bowl. The Rebels downed Boise State 35-13 at the Georgia Dome in the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game on Aug. 28.
Missouri is playing in its first Florida-based bowl game since beating Southern Miss 19-17 in the 1981 Tangerine Bowl. The Orlando-based bowl has gone through three name changes -- the Florida Citrus, the Capital One and the Citrus -- since the Tigers bowled in the Sunshine State.
The state of Florida will host the most bowls (eight), edging Texas, which has seven. Alabama cities will host three bowl games, one fewer than the four games being played in California.
Louisiana Tech is back in the postseason against Illinois in the Heart of Dallas Bowl. Louisiana Tech is coached by Skip Holtz, the former Fayetteville High player and son of Lou Holtz. The Bulldogs were dealt the most cruel postseason fate in recent memory when their 9-3 team in 2012, the nation's scoring leader with 51.5 points per game, was left out of the bowls after dragging their feet on an offer to play in the Independence Bowl and being shut out elsewhere.
There was no room at the table for six eligible teams: Texas State (7-5) and five 6-6 teams -- Middle Tennessee State, Ohio, Old Dominion, Temple and Alabama-Birmingham, which has played its last football game after the program was dissolved because of financial issues.
Sports on 12/20/2014