2016-17 College Football Playoff semifinal pairings announced

By Kevin Kelley -

The 2016-17 College Football Playoff semifinal pairings have been announced. Alabama, the top-ranked team, will play No. 4 Washington in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl.

Clemson, the No. 2 team, will play No. 3 Ohio State in the PlayStation Fiesta Bowl.

The College Football Playoff Selection Committee will announce the four remaining bowls in the “New Year’s Six” around 2:30pm ET. Those bowls are as follows: Capital One Orange Bowl, Goodyear Cotton Bowl, Rose Bowl Game, and Allstate Sugar Bowl.

The remaining bowls will be announced throughout the day and finalized by this evening.

Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl
Saturday, Dec. 31, 2016 – 3pm ET, ESPN
(1) Alabama 24, (4) Washington 7

PlayStation Fiesta Bowl
Saturday, Dec. 31, 2016 – 7pm ET, ESPN
(2) Clemson 31, (3) Ohio State 0

National Championship Game (Tampa, FL)
Monday, Jan. 9, 2017 – 8:30pm ET, ESPN
(2) Clemson vs. (1) Alabama

Bowl Schedules

Comments (14)

I have absolutely no problem with this out come. Congrats to The Ohio State for staying in & Washington for getting in & beating out Michigan & Penn St. I think we will have another rematch with Clemson vs Bama.

A Big Joke! PSU wins head vs. head tiebreaker against Michigan and Ohio State and miss the Play-Offs? PSU would not advance against a team that lost to Iowa which lost to North Dakota? Why is Washington in and Oklahoma not?

Ohio st can’t even win their conference or play in the big 10 championship game. They should not be here!

I’d rather see Michigan instead of Washington .. at least they’d make it a game for the 1st half.

Yeah power corrupts .. can’t believe it’s only been 3 years. No way Ohio St. Should be in. Urban played in 3 different conferences and must have the right contacts. Not only did they not win the conference championship, they didn’t have to risk another loss this past weekend.

It will be interesting to see how schools handle scheduling going forward. It’s becoming clear that a 2-loss team is very unlikely to make the playoff, even if they played a strong OOC schedule.

A win over Oklahoma probably helped Ohio State get into the playoff, but you have to think that a 12-0 Oklahoma would have been in the playoff if it had played 3 cupcake games instead of Houston and Ohio State. The loss to Pitt probably kept Penn State out of the playoff. A loss to Houston probably kept Louisville out of the Orange Bowl. A loss at Northwestern helped keep Stanford out of the playoff last year.

In 2014, a terrible OOC schedule may have hurt Baylor when there were 6 P5 teams at one-loss or better, but Washington was not hurt in a year when there were only 4 P5 teams at one-loss or better.

I hate it as a fan, but the risk/reward calculation would seem to favor playing at most one quality OOC game.

Washington’s weak non league schedules are coming to an end. (1) Wisconsin bailed out on a 2018-2021 home & 2 years ago. UW then added BYU and Michigan for 2018-2021. Last month UW gave up a home game in 2018 with Nevada and will play Auburn in Atlanta (neutral site-3 hour drive from Auburn and a 2,300 mile flight from Seattle). UW has a terrible time getting quality OOC opponents to come to Seattle. The Rutgers series was set up in March 2014 when Rutgers was joining the Big10 and coming off 7 bowls in 8 seasons and defeated Michigan that 1st year. No one knew that they would stink up the place so bad. UW plays 9 league games. In 2018 it will be 9 league games plus BYU and Auburn, only 6 home games. Show me one SEC team that ever plays 11 Power 5 teams in one season.

Great, back to the SEC bashing. I don’t have a problem with Washington schedule, its not a problem to play two easy wins during the season, all teams do it. You mentioned about showing you a team from the SEC that play(s) or has played 11 P5 teams, try Georgia. Not sure why you bring the SEC into this when Wisconsin is the team that bailed out on Washington. Rutgers was not a bad add on at the time, Washington was down as well & it is still BIG vs Pac-12. As for bringing this up “(neutral site-3 hour drive from Auburn and a 2,300 mile flight from Seattle)”. Who cares, if Washington is the better team then they will win no matter how far they have to travel. I mean last year Wisconsin had to travel to San Diego & play USC in a bowl game, USC backyard as some would say, the Badgers won. Its great that the Huskies are doing well & was offered a neutral site game for a lot of money. They also made it to the CFP this year, good for them. Chris Peterson is a great coach & hopefully he will live long at Washington.

Fact of (scheduling) life, for some ooc games. Money games, no doubt scheduled years in advance, for a weaker conference school. I.e. Kent St.,( MAC, & Saban’s alma mater) to bank some bucks playing Alabama. Some times it doesn’t matter: Bama smashed USC (9&3) to start the season, humiliated the Gators (8&4) in the SEC championship game. However, I would have liked to see another ” pre-playoff”: OSU VS. undefeated Western Michigan. Think I’m drunk or high? Penn St lost to Pitt, for God’s sake!