Author: Scott Adamson

Got some breaking news here: The National Football League team that I root for – the New York Jets – will not be participating in the upcoming playoffs.

Seems a 5-11 record wasn’t quite good enough for Todd Bowles’ crew to sneak into a wildcard spot, so I get to play adopt-a-team for yet another postseason.

Most recently, the Atlanta Falcons have served as my “silver medalists.” By that I mean they were the team I cheered for when I wasn’t cursing the misfortune of the Jets.

It was fun following them all the way to the Super Bowl a year ago; it was not quite so fun seeing them deliver the choke of the century against New England. It was especially hard to swallow against the Patriots because, you know, that Jets thing.

Therefore, with Atlanta taking on the Los Angeles Rams tonight in an NFC wildcard game, it is safe to assume I’ll again be donning the red and black and hoping Matt Ryan gets his MVP swagger back.

Safe, but incorrect.

Now that the Rams are back in L.A., it allows me to return to the rooting interest I established in the Stone Age – back when there was both an American Football league and National Football League.

As a kid, I liked the AFL better than the NFL. It was more high-scoring and more fun, and with the Jets featuring guys like Joe Namath, Don Maynard, Matt Snell, George Sauer and Emerson Boozer, they quickly became the team I lived and died with.

But, the NFL was still the senior circuit, so I couldn’t and didn’t ignore it.

And even though I had some affection for the Green Bay Packers – my dad’s favorite team – the NFL club I claimed for my own was the Los Angeles Rams.

Deacon Jones was the defensive player I admired most in all of football, and QB Roman Gabriel had his own brand of “cool.” Bernie Casey and Jack Snow, of course, were great receivers.

Plus, they had those cool blue helmets with white horns.

Thus, in the two-league era, my teams were the Jets and the Rams, with the Shea Stadium tenants my overall faves.

After the merger, the Rams continued to be my “backup” team, and held that status until 1994.

That’s when they moved to St. Louis and that’s when I completely stopped caring about them.

Nothing against the Independent City – I’m sure it’s populated by fine people. But just as the Colts aren’t really the Colts unless they’re in Baltimore and the Raiders were never the Raiders when they were in L.A. (and certainly won’t be in Las Vegas), NFL teams whose mascot is an intact male sheep should call Southern California home.

But now they’re back, and while I know the folks in Missouri were heartbroken to see them leave, I was quite happy to have “my” Rams once again working and playing in the City of Angels.

And it turns out the 2017-18 season has been a good one to jump back on the bandwagon.

They won the NFC West with an 11-5 record and have the best young coach in the game in Sean McVay.

(McVay, by the way, is the grandson of John McVay, who coached the Memphis Southmen of the World Football League. I’m a WFL aficionado, so this family tie has special meaning for me).

The Rams also feature rushing sensation Todd Gurley, who I covered in college when he played at Georgia, and QB Jared Goff, who has been simply outstanding in his second pro season and first as a full-time starter.

And being a guy who likes offense, the fact that L.A. leads the NFL in scoring at 29.9 points per game has made it quite easy for me to transition back to rooting for the Rams.

So while Jets management is trying to figure out what long snapper to take in the first round of draft on April 26, the Rams will host the Falcons today at 8:15 p.m.

And that means I have a postseason clash to get excited about.

That being said, I want to thank Atlanta for giving me the opportunity to rock red and black for the last two decades plus. I’ll always hold a soft spot in my heart for you guys. And hey – if you win this evening, I’ll be in your corner for the rest of the playoffs.

Still, I really do look better in blue.

On Monday night, Atlanta will be the center of the college football world and the only teams being talked about will be Alabama and Georgia.

The Crimson Tide (12-1) and Bulldogs (13-1) will meet in the College Football Playoff National Championship, and the one who walks off the turf at Mercedes-Benz Stadium will be covered in confetti and holding the big trophy.

They will be the consensus No. 1, and hailed as such.

Yet there will be a certain satisfaction in being a member of the Central Florida University football team.

Because while the official national champs will have one blemish on their record, UCF players will have been on the only team that has none.

The Knights beat all comers, and with a 13-0 record they are the lone unbeaten in the Football Bowl Subdivision.

Their perfect season was capped off with a Peach Bowl victory over Auburn – the team that beat both Georgia and Alabama in the regular season.

Ironically, the conquest came at the same stadium that will crown a champion on Jan. 8.

Yet, UCF was not part of the CFP, ranked No. 12 entering the bowls. And even if the field had been expanded from four teams to eight, trust me – they still would not have been part of the CFP.

Oh, they got invited to the party in the form of a New Year’s Six bowl game, but they were never going to be allowed to participate in the celebration.

When it comes to playoffs, it’s a Power 5 world … and Group of 5 teams don’t even get to live in it.

“I guess to the (CFP Selection) Committee, it’s just what more can we do?” asked Knights linebacker Shaquem Griffin. “We won all of them, and I just feel that we should have had an opportunity to show our talents to any and every team that wants to go against us. There’s no more teams left for us to beat.”

Indeed.

There’s no way of knowing how Central Florida would’ve fared in the playoff, but it would’ve been nice to know, wouldn’t it?

But that was never part of the plan.

Allowing the top Group of 5 team to make a “big” bowl game is really rather cynical, when you think about it.

By throwing them that particular bone, it’s the FBS’s way of saying, “You really don’t belong, but we’ll pretend like you do.”

“Going through the season, I was afraid to say much about the rankings and everything because I’m a little superstitious,” said UCF’s outgoing boss Scott Frost, who is now officially on the job as the head coach at his alma mater, Nebraska.  “And just when a coach starts running his mouth, that’s when you lose the next game. But it wasn’t right. I was watching every week, the Committee sitting in a room and decide this two-loss team must be better than UCF because UCF is in the American (Athletic Conference). Or this three-loss team must be better than UCF.”

The argument, of course, is strength of schedule. Conventional wisdom suggests the SEC, ACC, Big 12, etc., play a tougher slate that any team in the AAC.

OK.

But UCF’s schedule was anything but a breeze.

Both Memphis and South Florida were quality league foes, and they had to beat the Tigers twice.

The Knights played Maryland of the mighty Big Ten and whipped them by four touchdowns. The Terps were 4-8, but it was still a G5 over a P5.

And there was that whole Auburn thing, a 34-27 decision over the No. 7 team in the CFP.

It was a matchup won by the better team.

“It looked like a conscious effort to me to make sure that they didn’t have a problem if they put us too high and a couple teams ahead of us lost,” Frost said of the Selection Committee’s rankings. “And oh, no, now we have to put them in a playoff. But we just beat a team that beat two playoff teams and lost to another one (Clemson) by six points and we beat them by seven.
“And Auburn is a great team. I’m not taking anything away from them. I give them a ton of credit. But these guys deserve everything they get, and they deserve more credit from the Committee than what they got.”

Again, an eight-team playoff wouldn’t have solved the problem because the field would be populated by five Power 5 champions and three Power 5 wildcards.

And an expansion to 16 teams probably won’t happen.

So we have what we have – and what we have are people in a room selecting playoff participants based on plenty of subjective criteria.

As I’ve said over and over again, this is not so much a playoff as it is an invitational.

And a great team like UCF was never going to get invited, despite the fact they did what no other team could this season.

And that’s a shame.

“Like Coach already told us, only thing we can keep doing is winning games,” Griffin said. “And I don’t think we have any more games left to win.”