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HOUSTON -- On Friday evening, the de facto start of the 2024 College Football Playoff championship weekend, the technicians in the Houston media hotel were struggling with a bank of TV monitors. The screens were supposed to be showing various sports channels and fancy digital CFP logos, but instead, as the ballroom engineers were testing the monitors, they plugged in to the in-house cable. What popped up on the video wall was a Star Wars movie, "The Phantom Menace."
What was shown were dueling Jedi and Sith lords. What could just as easily have been featured, requiring no title change at all, were the headshots of two college football pariahs, shadowy figures who have been spotted in public sparsely over the last two months, but even in those fleeting moments managed to cast some form of clouds over the accomplishments of the teams they were there to support.