College football’s hottest teams include 2 in the Playoff and 1 each in the Rose and Orange

The whole college football season matters. That’s what we tell ourselves. A baseball team could go 83-78 and win the World Series. An NFL team can go 9-7 and win the Super Bowl. An NBA team can go 44-38 and win the NBA title. But that doesn’t happen in college football.

If it did, USC or Florida State might be a title favorite. Or hey, maybe Western Kentucky.

Many college football fans have long rebelled against the thought of an eight- or 16-team FBS playoff because of what it would do to the luster of the regular season. You maybe get one mulligan, but you definitely don’t get two, so the “every game matters” mantra rings mostly true.

Considering that TV ratings and attendance aren’t exactly soaring at the moment, there is probably some justification to the thought of keeping the Playoff field small. But for worse or better, limiting ourselves to four national title competitors means depriving ourselves of watching some of the hottest teams in the country playing for the title.

A year-end ranking doesn’t tell a team’s entire story, in other words. Below, you’ll find S&P+ rankings broken into six sortable categories: all of 2016, September, October, November, the first half of the season, and the second half of the season.

A quick summary:

Alabama and Clemson are in the Playoff. USC plays Penn State in the Rose. FSU gets Michigan in the Orange.

Aside from WKU’s presence, this seems about right, doesn’t it? Dominance from Michigan and Ohio State was the story of the season’s early going. Alabama began to surge after its narrow win over Ole Miss. LSU caught fire when Ed Orgeron took over. USC finished the season smoking hot. Florida State, meanwhile, wasn’t far off of the Trojans’ pace.

Don’t scoff at WKU’s presence, by the way.

Over their last six games, the Hilltoppers — maybe the top-ranked light heavyweight in all the land — beat C-USA opponents by an average of 54-18, and that includes games against Bahamas Bowl champion Old Dominion and Armed Forces Bowl winner Louisiana Tech. I always say it’s not who you play, it’s how you play, and WKU finished playing absurdly well.

Some more observations:

Sometimes stats and eyeballs agree. Anybody watching Baylor and Ole Miss in September and November saw shells of former selves. Meanwhile, teams like Arkansas State and NIU managed to find themselves as both younger players got more reps and respective schedules eased up a bit.

When Miami (Ohio) and Mississippi State kick off in Monday’s St. Petersburg Bowl, it will represent the least likely matchup of bowl season. First, there aren’t that many MAC-vs.-SEC battles to begin with; Miami hasn’t ever played an FBS team from Mississippi.

But that’s not why the matchup is so wild. Miami vs. anybody seemed impossible in mid-October.

Chuck Martin’s tenure at Miami began with an incredible 25 losses in 30 games, including an 0-6 start to 2016. They were competitive in losses to Western Kentucky (31-24) and Cincinnati (27-20), but a 35-13 loss at Akron seemed like a death knell for Martin’s tenure. He hadn’t been able to generate traction at a job that was a lot harder than it used to be. The Cradle of Coaches was ending careers.

In October, Miami took down awful Kent State and Bowling Green squads by a combined 18 points. Then it knocked off bowl teams EMU and CMU. A 35-24 win at Buffalo made the impossible possible: with a home win over Ball State, the Redhawks could finish a perfectly symmetrical 6-6 season.

Miami trailed 17-7 at halftime, but fate takes over sometimes. A 74-yard touchdown from Gus Ragland to Rokeem Williams brought the Redhawks within three, and with 5:44 left, a 27-yard strike to Sam Shisso gave them a 21-20 lead that would hold up.

There were some solid performances in the losses and some OK-at-best games during the win streak. And we don’t know if Martin has turned things around or if this is a blip. Either could be the case; in 2012, Rice surged from 2-6 to 7-6, then won 18 games and a Conference USA title over the next two seasons. But in 2015, Georgia State went from 2-6 to 6-6 to secure an unlikely bowl bid; the Panthers went 3-9 in 2016.

S&P+ adds one extra piece of symmetry: the Redhawks’ ranking for the second half of 2016 (57th) is exactly half of its ranking for the first half (114th).

Full-season ratings give Mississippi State about a six-point edge in St. Pete on Monday, but over the second half of the year, these teams were dead even: Miami was 57th in S&P+ in that span, and MSU was 58th. Granted, their strengths of schedule were drastically different; plus, the bowl break may have served to cool the Redhawks off.

Regardless, if the November iterations of these teams show up at Tropicana Field, the world’s worst day of bowls could be more entertaining than expected.