This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

College football is hurtling toward a great end this season, on account of its getting around to having an actual playoff to determine a champion.

At last.

Who knows what took so long. Well … we all do. Rearranging the politics of power and money — namely, who gets it and who doesn't — is a complicated matter, one that still hasn't been resolved in a way that will wholly satisfy competitive justice. Proof is always better than polls. And at least for four teams now, facts about them will emerge on the field, in head-to-head battle, not in the imaginations of a bunch of voters. Two was woefully incomplete. Four is better. Eight is best.

The thing's not perfect.

A right team might be left out. Maybe a wrong team will be left in.

The 12-member committee that will determine the Fortunate Four have their metrics, their data, their prisms, their biases, and they will set the field. Right now, their ranking has Mississippi State, Oregon, Florida State and TCU as the most worthy. That is bound to change. Alabama, Baylor and Arizona State are dancing on playoff's edge.

Even though a playoff that included each of the power conference champions, along with three at-large invitees, would be preferable, and would remove room for too many complaints about deserving teams being jobbed, what we've got here is kind of cool.

It's provided excitement on the local level, the Pac-12 level and, of course, the national level. It hasn't, as some feared, diminished the importance of the regular season — rather it's enhanced it. And anyone who believes it will reduce interest in the bottom half of the 39 bowls this year doesn't quite get how reduced the interest in those bowls already was.

Playoff fantasies entered the brains of almost everyone this season. BYU fans initially dreamed of a chance for the once 4-0 Cougars to find a way in. That was always a jump to the moon, considering the lack of punch in BYU's schedule, but in those early days, there was a small space to dream.

Utah has helped paint the playoff picture in a number of ways. First, the Utes were climbing their own rungs, moving toward a No. 17 ranking with a double-barreled opportunity against Arizona State and Oregon. Had they defeated the Devils and the Ducks, they'd be straight in the middle of things.

As it is, Utah fans rolled through the highs and lows of having their team be a player in, a shaper of, what might happen nationally, when the playoff is set. Once the Utes lost to ASU, a game the entire country was watching, tamping down their own thoughts of glory, they still had a say in whether Oregon would continue to climb.

Utah was in the thick of it. Utah football was important, far beyond the Wasatch Range, far beyond the Pac-12.

That's heady stuff.

The playoff also adds all kinds of implications for whichever team bubbles up to the top of the Pac-12. Great to be a league champion, better to have a shot at a national title.

Having four spots available has made prime games in every power conference more meaningful. The ramifications of those outcomes no longer are just regional. They now flow across the land.

One of college football's biggest problems has always been how fractured it is, how regionalized it is. It's tough to size up the champion of, say, the Big 12 against the champion of the Pac-12. Or the Big Ten versus the ACC.

That's why a national playoff is so significant, so necessary.

We all know this.

Prove it on the field. That's the way it always should have been. It almost makes you look back at 100 years of college football, at so many of the champions past, and think of what made them champions as a joke. Were they really the best team in the country in that year? No way of knowing. What we do know is this: They won the CFB pageant's evening gown competition. They looked radiant in blue or green or red or gold.

That's why taking the top teams and facing them against one another is so compelling. They were good enough to win their league or finish near the top of it … now, let's find out what they do against other great teams.

So, this year's playoff is incomplete. We can hope for better scenarios in the future. But it's superior to anything that preceded it. It's made games in the middle of October and the beginning of November a whole lot more interesting, here in Utah and everywhere else.

GORDON MONSON hosts "The Big Show" with Spence Checketts weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM/1280 and 960 AM The Zone. Twitter: @GordonMonson