4 quick reasons this should be the best College Football Playoff yet

The College Football Playoff is fun every year. The way the event sets up this season gives it a good chance to be even more fun than usual.

The semifinals rotate every year between the New Year’s Six bowls, in pairs:

College football bowl games are weird things. There is no hard and fast rule about which games end up better than others.

But if you conducted a nationwide poll of the question, “Which bowl game is the best?” more people would choose the Rose Bowl than any other game. You’d get a lot of the Sugar Bowl, too, with some Orange and Fiesta Bowls mixed in.

The Rose and Sugar Bowls are destination bowls even when they don’t have the Playoff. Big Ten and Pac-12 coaches have always mentioned winning Rose Bowls as program goals. SEC coaches have done the same with the Sugar Bowl (it’s only recently gained an annual Big 12 tie in non-CFP years). The Rose Bowl is the oldest bowl game (established 1902), while the Sugar Bowl is tied for next with the Orange Bowl (1935).

The College Football Playoff has a little extra flair when these games headline it, and we’re getting this rotation for the second time ever.

That’s in part thanks to this bowl pairing. The Rose Bowl is a New Year’s Day game, period, though it moves to Jan. 2 when New Year’s Day is a Sunday. (That’s because organizers decided more than a century ago that holding the event on Sundays might freak out some horses who were hitched outside churches on Sunday mornings. And also the NFL, though it came along decades later.)

The Playoff has made it fairly clear that it’ll never put the Rose Bowl semifinal on New Year’s Eve. This semifinal rotation is set for Jan. 1 on every turn through the 2023 season, and it’ll probably stay that way forever. That means you won’t have to choose between a party or a game, or have your attention split while doing both.

2014’s ratings for the semis were by far the Playoff’s best so far. They cratered on New Year’s Eve two seasons ago and crept back up slightly on NYE last year. This year’s games will kick at 5 p.m. ET (Rose) and 8:45 p.m. ET (Sugar), both on ESPN.

New Year’s Eve is good. But New Year’s Day is so much better for watching sports. The Playoff is thankfully heading in that direction in the future, but there will still be some more NYE semifinals. So, savor this year.

Mercedes-Benz Stadium is bananas. It’s also in Atlanta, the biggest city in the Southeast and one that’s forged a great college football tradition through years of hosting the SEC Championship Game with alumni bases from football schools all over the region. Any title game will have a good atmosphere, but Atlanta’s one of the best places imaginable to stick a neutral-site game of this magnitude.

The No. 4 seed is Alabama, the most talented team in the sport. No. 1 Clemson is the defending champion, No. 2 Oklahoma has the Heisman-winning quarterback, and No. 3 Georgia just whomped the team that had whomped Bama a week earlier in the Iron Bowl.

The semi point spreads are Georgia -1.5 against Oklahoma in the Rose Bowl and Alabama -3 against Clemson in the Sugar Bowl — as close as they can be.

The top seed is an underdog. This is the first time in four Playoff years that it really feels like any team in the field could win. Florida State didn’t feel that way in 2014, and Michigan State (2015) and Washington (2016) had absolutely no chance in retrospect.

The parity of this field is without precedent, and it comes in the best conditions possible to make for a great Playoff.