On Monday night, the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame will take on the Ohio State Buckeyes in top-level college football’s national championship game.

The stakes are understandably high. Ohio State head coach Ryan Day is fighting for redemption after his team lost yet another game to rival Michigan late in the regular season. Notre Dame, meanwhile, is seeking its first national championship since Hall of Fame coach Lou Holtz led the Fighting Irish to victory in January 1989. Notre Dame’s current head coach, Marcus Freeman, who has already made history as the first Black and the first Asian coach to make it to the championship game, has a chance to lead his team all the way to the top.

But the biggest question hovering over all of college football is a complicated one. This year saw the first ever 12-team College Football Playoff, a change from the old four-team system. So, has this new playoff indeed been a success?

To be fair, college football was already on the right track. For several years, the gap between the blue bloods of college football and the middle-tier programs and conferences was shrinking. It seemed it was finally time for an expanded playoff that allowed more teams to compete for a shot at the big show.

But the process remains far from perfect. The first and second rounds of this new expanded playoff yielded little drama, with nearly all of the heavily favored teams bulldozing the competition. I’m still hopeful the gap is shrinking. But the new name, image and likeness (NIL) rule, coupled with an expanded transfer portal, has led to wild player movements, most of which still favor the top schools in the top conferences while depleting smaller conferences of their most prized prospects.

The transfer portal is enabling college football’s Power 5 conferences (the ACC, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pac-12 and the Southeastern Conference) to raid up-and-coming programs and persuade stars to come and play for higher profile teams. They can do this with bigger NIL deals and promises of major TV exposure, which in turn lead to potentially higher NFL draft positions and better NFL contracts for the luckiest ones.

UConn’s football program is led by Jim Mora Jr. The former NFL head coach promised at the end of December to “pursue all avenues” to stop schools from pilfering from his program. But just a few days later, Mora watched one of his defensive stars walk out the door to play for Bill Belichick and the North Carolina Tar Heels. North Carolina is in the ACC. UConn does not play in a conference.

There is also still the problem of an extremely subjective selection process that pits strength of schedule against teams’ overall win-loss records. Notre Dame is a prime example of this contradictory dynamic. It beat four ranked opponents during the regular season, but none of those teams was ranked higher than 15th at the time of the game. In my opinion, few of Notre Dame’s opponents during the 2024 regular season could be considered true college football powerhouses, even if they came from historically strong programs.  On the other side of the bracket, Ohio State narrowly lost to the top-ranked team in the country (Oregon) and rival Michigan but beat third-ranked Penn State and fifth-ranked Indiana.

So one could argue that while Notre Dame lost one fewer regular season game than Ohio State, its win-loss total shouldn’t be viewed as superior to that of a team that played a tougher overall schedule in a traditionally difficult conference.

Notre Dame has proved it deserves to be in this championship game. In the playoffs it beat an Indiana team that had just one loss, and it went on to defeat Georgia and a strong-looking Penn State.

Even so, Ohio State is an 8.5-point favorite tonight, perhaps reflecting the theory that strength of schedule remains the best indicator of elite success. Coach Day’s squad is also the more talented team. That said, his players do make mistakes. They are not unbeatable. Ask Michigan. I think Notre Dame stays within that number but Ohio State wins 27-23.