For the second year in a row, Alabama and Clemson faced off in the biggest stage in college football. For anyone who has paid some attention to college football this season, Alabama was an absolute juggernaut, but gave up a last second touchdown to Clemson. Although Bama seemed by far like the best team all season, they fell short on the biggest stage.

This means that Clemson is now the best team in the country, in spite of dropping a game to an inferior Pittsburgh team at home. Teams that lost similar games this season, especially early on, such as USC, Penn State, and Oklahoma among others (trying to not show bias towards Michigan) were left out of the title conversation altogether. As clear as it may seem this season as to who the champion is in Clemson after their last two games, it is still very questionable as to whether or not the system is perfect. There will always be people who oppose the current system of a four team playoff, but that means the concept of 'what makes a national champion' will always be rather vague and lead to disputes.

Some people that I’ve spoken to on the matter have said that the best system is the old system: have the top teams in the nation play each other in a slew of bowl games, and have a committee decide the overall champ. This works in that it gives several bowl games significance that now are less important such as the Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl, and Cotton Bowl in this year’s bowl season. But the issue with this system lies in the fact that the best teams won't always get to play each other. In other words, there’s a reason the system changed to a committee deciding on the national championship game, and eventually to the four team playoff format.

The playoff, depending on who you talk to, seems to work really well or not work at all. It turned out the best team in the country in the 2014-15 season was Ohio State, who was the 4 seed in the 4 team tourney. The last two years, the matchup has been Alabama-Clemson, which were both very action-packed, memorable games between two teams with great coaching and loads of NFL talent. However, in the 4 team format, some teams representing their respective conferences get left out of the mix, such as the Big 12 in 2014-2015 and this year as well, as well as the Pac 12 in 2015-2016 In each case, there was a one-loss team who won their conference and was left out of the playoff altogether for whatever vague metric the committee used. This season, a non-conference champion Ohio State team was voted in as the 3 seed and did not look at all ready to perform on this stage, whereas the team that beat them and actually won the Big 10, Penn State, was left out because of their two losses. A very tricky dilemma that the committee had to answer a lot of questions about.

The latest idea brought up was expansion to an 8 team bracket. But how would that work? How would the game be dispersed throughout 3 weeks? This would make college football resemble the NFL’s playoff system, but at least it would be less selective and would leave less teams out who were deserving of a spot. Then again, the 8 team bracket format may yield a lot of unfair match-ups, and thus the first week of games would be exciting to anticipate but maybe not as exciting to watch. When one team has more speed than the other in the college game, it’s very hard for slower teams to keep up, no pun intended, which is why the last couple of bowl seasons between highly ranked opponents have yielded blowouts.

So what metric is the most important when picking who qualifies for the playoff? Obviously conference championships don't matter as much when you look at the Ohio State and Penn State dilemma, and the best records aren't always taken into account, case in point Western Michigan. Granted Western Michigan had a much easier schedule as opposed to the teams in the playoff, but they were still undefeated, and the committee seems to not be putting any teams with more than one loss in the final four. As said before, very confusing.

I acknowledge Clemson now as the national champion, as they dethroned the defending champ, as well as the best looking team all season. I also acknowledge the current format as probably the closest thing to perfect in deciding who really is the national champion. I'm just saying, the best teams sometimes never get to play each other, so it can always be up to interpretation.