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Temple-Navy helped the playoff committee avoid bowl armageddon

Published Dec. 9, 2016 12:45 p.m. ET

Dieter Kurtenbach

The College Football Playoff committee has a tough enough time deciding the four best teams in the nation, but the committee is also tasked with determining the best Group of Five team in the nation.

Heading into Saturday's games, that second question was as tough as the first one.

There wasn't much between the top two Group of Five candidates.

Take Western Michigan, which won the MAC with a less-than-inspiring-fashion performance in that conference's title game over Ohio Friday in Detroit, which confirmed that P.J. Fleck's Broncos — who entered the week as the top Group of Five team in the CFP rankings — would finish the regular season with an undefeated 13-0 season.

They have to be the top-ranked team when the final rankings come out Sunday, right?

But Navy, at 9-2 in the American — a significantly better conference than the MAC — and with impressive wins over Houston, Memphis, and Tulsa (Notre Dame is not an impressive win anymore — what a time ...) and an incredible run to end the season — the Middies averaged 70 points in the final two games — were right there, too.

Navy sat two spots behind Western Michigan in the CFP standings going into this week. If the Middies beat Temple in the American championship game, that could have leapfrogged Western Michigan, right?

And if that happened, what would it mean if they lost the Army-Navy game?

The likelihood was that everything would have been put in a holding pattern until the end of that Army-Navy game, which is the only FBS game that will be played next weekend.

You could have made a final determination on Navy before its season ended, but can you really job the Naval Academy out of a spot in a big-time bowl?

We talk about chaos all the time in the college football world, but having to parse all of that, and perhaps having to put everything on hold for another week — that would have been true chaos.

The committee had to breathe a collective sigh of relief when Temple blew out the Midshipmen in Annapolis to win the American on Saturday.

It was an unequivocal 34-10 beat-down, on the road. Temple turned in its best performance of the year to win the school's first conference title since 1967.

Key injuries to Navy's starting quarterback and slot back didn't help its cause, but that's not a concern for the committee. They only cared that Navy's momentum — in both in the game and on the season — was halted.

Crisis avoided.

Western Michigan is going to row its boat to Arlington and the Cotton Bowl.

Someone should tell P.J. Fleck when he gets out of his interviews.