Gonzaga will take its swing for a men's basketball national championship tonight when it faces North Carolina in the Final Four in Phoenix.
It would be the culmination of a remarkable run that essentially started in 1995 if the Bulldogs could win a national title while playing in the West Coast Conference. This comes less than a year after Coastal Carolina won the College World Series in 2016 while playing in the Sun Belt. That prompts the easy question.
How could we see a story like this unfold in college football, a sport where the odds are stacked against the Group of 5 conferences in the FBS? Western Michigan finished 13-0 in the regular season in 2016 and No. 15 in the final College Football Playoff rankings. That's prompted some loose talk about the Group of 5 creating their own playoff.
It's almost impossible, but that's not to say it couldn't happen one year. The last time "it" happened was 1984, when BYU won the national championship out of the WAC conference. The Cougars beat an unranked Michigan team in the Holiday Bowl to claim the national title.
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“We were getting closer and closer and heard a lot of negative stuff," Cougars quarterback Robbie Bosco told SN in 2014. "We got up to No. 5 early, and it became kind of a distraction. On one hand, we had a chance to do this. On the other hand, you had people saying you don’t deserve this.”
Sound familiar? Boise State, Marshall, Houston and Western Michigan have heard that talk through the BCS and College Football Playoff eras. Perhaps no sport wants to keep Cinderella in the attic quite like college football.
There's a way out, however, and it still would take a lot of stars to align to make it happen. A Group of 5 school would have to go undefeated in back-to-back seasons to warrant serious playoff consideration.
Western Michigan became the 10th non-power conference school to go undefeated in the regular season since the BCS started in 1998, a list that also includes Tulane (1998), Marshall (1999), Utah (2004, 2008), Boise State (2006, 2009), Hawaii (2007) and TCU (2009, 2010). The Horned Frogs finished third in the BCS standings in 2010, so in a four-team format that would've made it.
The best example in that list, however, is Boise State, a program that is similar to Gonzaga in many ways given the length of the time the program has been successful. The Broncos went undefeated in 2009 and started the 2010 season with a 10-0 record. Boise State was at No. 3 in the polls at that point and a serious national title contender, but a 34-31 overtime loss to Nevada dropped the Broncos to No. 10 in the polls. There is no margin for error — even in a two-year path to the playoff.
Houston found that out last season. The Cougars finished 13-1 in 2015 and beat Florida State in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, and they opened the 2016 season with an impressive 33-23 win against No. 3 Oklahoma. The Cougars rose to No. 6 before losing at Navy, but what if Houston had gone undefeated? Would that have been enough given the two-year run?
That's the closest we've come so far in the College Football Playoff era, and Bosco knows the only other possible path. He was speaking for BYU in 2014 after the Cougars got off to a hot start, but he might as well be speaking for any non-Power 5 conference school in the future. South Florida appears to be the early favorite to be that best hope in 2017.
“It has to be something special like we did," Bosco said. "I think (they) would have to be the only undefeated team left. If everybody else has at least one loss, then I think we would have a shot at it.”
So the alternatives are hoping for everybody else to lose once (or twice) or waiting for the playoffs to expand to eight teams. Complicating that path is often times, coaches such as Chris Petersen, Tom Herman and P.J. Fleck leave to take bigger jobs.
Or just go undefeated twice in a row. That's how a Group of 5 school might get their shot at a much-more exclusive College Football Playoff party. From there, they would have to win two more games against Power 5 powerhouses.
That's how that could happen, and it would be every bit as big as Gonzaga or Coastal Carolina. Imagine Appalachian State making that run out of the Sun Belt or Boise State putting together another run out of the Mountain West and finally getting their shot.
Wouldn't that be the biggest Cinderella story of them all?
