In 1993, an 11-1 Notre Dame team finished second in the poll, behind a 12-1 Florida State team that had defeated the Fighting Irish in the regular season. Notre Dame fans were angry that they were denied a national championship because the sport refused to put its champion on the field. The school’s athletic director, Dick Rosenthal, did not share her point of view.

“(Notre Dame’s) position was to reject the playoffs because we don’t believe in extending the season,” he said. “It is a threat to the student-athlete’s academic success.”

Guess which school will host the first-ever College Football Playoff home game 31 years later?

Notre Dame hosts Indiana on Friday night in the first game of the first year of a 12-team postseason tournament. It’s nothing short of a miracle that there are four FBS playoff games on college campuses this weekend, considering that coaches, athletic directors, university presidents, conference commissioners and, of course, bowl managers have been warning us for decades about all the dire consequences That day will ever come.

“If our team were fortunate enough to qualify, there would be a very serious academic conflict,” Tennessee athletic director Bob Woodruff wrote in a 1971 NCAA News editorial. “In order to play more than one football game during the holiday period from mid-December to January 1, special (testing) schedules would be required.”

It only took 53 years, but Tennessee must have figured something out. The Vols play a first-round playoff game at Ohio State on Saturday. If they win, they will play again on January 1st in Pasadena, California.

College football’s endless debate over conducting NFL-style playoffs dates back to at least the 1960s, when several prominent coaches began advocating for such a system. One of the first was Penn State University’s Joe Paterno, who didn’t live to see the Nittany Lions host SMU on Saturday in a first-round game with temperatures expected to be in the low 70s and possibly snow.

Their voices remained in the minority among college athletic leaders for decades. It took until 1998 for an official national championship game to be held at one of the four bowl sites, and then until 2014 to hold a four-team playoff. Anything beyond that was a bridge too far.

“I have to tell you, I really don’t think there’s going to be an NFL-style playoff in college football anytime soon,” then-BCS coordinator Kevin Weiberg said in 2005. He was right.

Academics were one of the main excuses (ahem, concerns) expressed by university presidents and others. Not to mention the fact that basketball players have been commuting across the country for three weeks during March Madness or that the College World Series is well beyond graduation. Football players would certainly fail if they had to play an extra game in the finals week.

“They’re going to rip a playoff system out of my cold, dead hands,” then-Ohio State president Gordon Gee said in 2007. Gee, now West Virginia’s president, is still very much alive.

Another major concern was that a larger playoff would ruin college football’s exciting regular season. In a 2008 interview, Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese referenced Pitt’s season-ending upset of West Virginia the previous season, which had knocked the Mountaineers completely out of contention for the national championship.

“If there had been a playoff, who would have seen this game?” he said. “It wouldn’t mean anything. West Virginia would already be in the playoffs.”

On the final day of this regular season, 16.6 million people watched an SEC championship game between two teams, Georgia and Texas, both of which were safely in the playoffs.

When it comes to hosting December games on campus, generations of leaders whose schools might get the opportunity to host the biggest home game in their history found countless reasons to say “no thanks.”

For example, in 2019, then-Clemson athletic director Dan Radakovich said of potential home playoff games: “Have you ever tried to get a hotel (on short notice) in Clemson, SC, or Blacksburg, Virginia?”

Well, problem solved: Clemson is playing its first-round game in Austin, Texas, where there are 50,000 hotel rooms. (In addition, CFP’s travel agency secured hotel allotments near all of its main competitors months ago.)

And oh yes, the cold weather. No cold weather please. It doesn’t matter that lower-tier schools in Montana and Minnesota have long played outdoor postseason games.

“There needs to be some accounting of stadiums that need to be winterized in the months of December and January, etc.,” Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said in 2021.

No need to panic. Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft said the newly renovated Beaver Stadium would be ready for use this weekend.

“The heat is rolling,” he said. “Everything will be fine.”

The root cause of all these excuses (ahem, concerns) was the sport’s undying loyalty to its bowl game-hosting friends. Generations of coaches, player managers and spectators enjoyed holiday visits to Pasadena, California, New Orleans and Miami and dared not betray the people of those communities. Who unequivocally warned of the existential threat of a playoff.

“Basically,” Liberty Bowl general manager William McElroy Jr. said in 1984, “I think it would put the bowls out of business.”

When McElroy said this, there were 18 bowl games. Today there are 41. Six of them will host playoff games starting December 31st.

So what has changed? Why, after six decades of struggle, have commissioners and their universities’ presidents finally agreed to an event in which Notre Dame, Penn State, Ohio State and Texas will host playoff games in the cold and snowy December? Why are they now okay with Indiana, SMU, Clemson and Tennessee athletes spending the last week of their semester practicing for a road game? Or because the four losing schools miss a bowl trip?

If money had been the only motive, they would have done this a long time ago — like in the 1990s, when a Swiss marketing firm offered to host a 16-team playoff that would pay schools $300 million a year. four times what the BCS was doing back then. (That company, ISL, went out of business shortly thereafter amid a mountain of debt.)

The simple answer might be that college football has evolved. Drastic. Freshmen who were ineligible became some of their teams’ biggest stars. Recruitment letters gave way to Instagram DMs. The I formation and belly dive gave way to shotguns and RPOs.

And little by little, over time — albeit at the speed of a 350-pound offensive lineman — more and more executives became receptive to the idea that maybe that just might be the case Perhaps, It was possible to hold a major playoff without destroying everything we hold sacred.

In this column, you’ve heard from a wide range of playoff doomsayers. Here we pay tribute to the late Washington Post columnist William Barry Furlong, who in 1974 predicted the mindset that would ultimately prevail, even if it took another 50 years.

“If college football claims to be a part of Americana,” he wrote, “it must acknowledge something of the American spirit.” There are deeper currents in the American people than rah-rah and pennant-waving. Because deep in the American psyche is the need to finish things properly, to have an end to things and at the same time have a beginning. The playoffs would reflect the spirit of the American people.”

On Friday evening, nearly 78,000 Americans will flock to Notre Dame Stadium for the start of this historic event, which will conclude properly exactly a month later in Atlanta.

We assume that the wait until this moment was worth it.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The athlete; Photo: Sam Hodde / Getty Images)