The Last Snub (and other Of The Years)
Before we get any further in 2024, here are the best Thrill Shot storylines from 2023.
I started collecting 2023 championship storylines in October. By the middle of December, I had so many I wish I could’ve covered. So here are some of the strongest thrill shots, champions (and a runner-up) that stood out for their emotionally-charged storylines as well as their accomplishments.
This list will give you a reflection back on last year’s sports cycle and an idea of what to expect for the 2024 calendar. Enjoy.
Team of the Year: Florida State University Football went 13-Out
During a USC-Auburn men’s basketball game on December 17, 2023, the Tigers led the Trojans by 23, and a courtside interview with Charles Barkley veered away from his alma mater’s game to the College Football Playoff committee’s decision to exclude Florida State two weeks prior.
Barkley spoke about the committee including his college rival Alabama (one loss, one victory over juggernaut Georgia, and the SEC title) over Florida State (zero losses, two injured quarterbacks, and the ACC title).
“Winning with backups should have [given] you Brownie points,” Barkley said, “not penalized you.”
The Seminoles defeated No.5 LSU 45-24 in their opening game and ran the table in the ACC with conference Offensive Player of the Year Jordan Travis at quarterback.
Travis broke his leg in FSU’s twelfth game against Northern Alabama, but Florida State reached 13-0 with a 24-15 rivalry win at Florida with backup QB Tate Rodemaker under center.
Rodemaker entered concussion protocol after a fourth quarter hit by the Gators led to concussion symptoms the next day. Third-string true freshman Brock Glenn started the ACC championship game against Louisville.
The Seminoles won 16-6 and watched ESPN’s College Football Playoff Selection Show as one of three programs with Power 5 conference titles and unblemished records.
Big Ten champions Michigan landed the top seed. Pac-12 champions Washington slotted in second.
“Florida State winds up at number five,” host Rece Davis said, “and Florida State is the first undefeated champion of a Power Five conference to fail to make the field in the College Football Playoff era.”
In the final year of the four-team playoff, Florida State won with their best player, stayed undefeated with one backup, won their conference with another backup.
They may have received some metaphorical Brownie points for not losing under difficult circumstances, but they did not receive a playoff spot from the coaches and administrators who chose the participants.
Making the invisible bracket visible
On the ESPN Daily episode from November 29, a week before the playoff contenders would compete in their conference championship games, Ryan McGee described the college football process leading to the final four:
“The bracket was already there. You just gotta look for it.”
The official bracket consists of two games, but the non-conference matchups, conference gauntlets and championship games whittle the field from August to December.
The stages before the 2023 national semifinals looked different for each prospective participant. Here’s how we got to the four-team playoff that included two one-loss programs and excluded one undefeated Power Five champ.1
Let’s start with the easy ones: Michigan and Washington.
Michigan vs. Ohio State is a bracket matchup that the entire Big Ten season leads us to. The committe chose one of these teams in seven of the 10 CFP seasons. Undefeated Michigan 30, previously undefeated Ohio State 24. The Wolverines were in.
Washington and Oregon emerged from the contenders out west. The Huskies and Ducks ended up with a European soccer-style two-legged playoff. Washington won both games by three, once in the regular season and again in the Pac-12 title game, to make a clean entrance into the CFP.
Texas, the committee’s third seed, beat Alabama 34-24 in Tuscaloosa, but lost to Oklahoma in Red River Rivalry. The Sooners subsequently lost to Kansas and Oklahoma State. The Longhorns beat both the Jayhawks and Cowboys, emerging as the best of four like a World Cup group winner.2
The Longhorns’ win over the Crimson Tide turned into a handy resumé line after Alabama cleared the second-most complicated portion of the bracket.
Alabama entered the loser’s bracket of a double-elimination tournament with the Texas loss. After a reeling off a streak of SEC wins and a November 18 drubbing of Chattanooga, the Tide faced two knockout games.
They needed a fourth-and-31 touchdown to defeat Auburn 27-24 and stay in the national conversation.
That victory set up a meeting with the two-time defending champions on a 29-game winning streak. Alabama beat Georgia 27-24 to survive at 11-1.
Like Michigan, Washington and Alabama, Florida State took care of their conference games. Unlike the Crimson Tide, the Seminoles took care of their non-conference games.
Florida State’s bracket turned out to be the most complicated because to see it, you have to squint to reveal blurred images of losses to teams from the past and losses that happened to players, not the team. Here’s a rundown of undefeated FSU’s defeats:
2014 Ohio State 59, 2023 Florida State 16: This is the number of points scored in these teams’ respective conference championship games while starting a third-string quarterback. Brock Glenn played the 2023 ACC title game under the shadow of Buckeyes QB Cardale Jones. Ohio State blanked Wisconsin and won the first four-team playoff from the bottom spot with Jones throwing for 742 yards and 5 touchdowns in the three most important games of his career. Glenn went 8/21 for 55 yards and no touchdowns against Louisville.3
2021 Alabama 27, 2021 Cincinatti 6 and 2022 Georgia 65, 2022 TCU 7: Both teams on the losing end of these blowouts raised questions about whether they should be there. Both of the winners came from the SEC. Florida State, without Travis, made people wonder if they should be there. Alabama just won the SEC.
Florida State’s injured quarterbacks 2, every other playoff contender’s injured quarterback’s 0: Travis went down in an unimportant nonconference win. Rodemaker went down in a rivalry game, then came back to finish the win before being ruled out. Part of the committee’s selection protocol allows members to consider significant injuries that may affect a team’s performance. They considered Florida State’s quarterback injuries and their replacements’ performance to be more of a problem for the playoff than a reason to reward the rest of the roster.
Alabama won their own portion of the bracket, and they won Florida State’s, too.
The logical argument from the committee was that the Florida State team that would participate in the playoff wasn’t the same team that won 13 games. They pointed to losing a quarterback, to Florida State’s performance without Travis, and at Alabama’s consecutive three-point wins over their historic rivals and their top contemporary challenger.
Football and figure skating
Some Seminole fans boycotted the playoff. Some boycotted ESPN. Some claimed conspiracy theories, pointing to Alabama’s presence in eight of the 10 brackets and ESPN’s newly signed deal to spend billions of dollars on SEC broadcast rights.
The government of Florida got involved because of, maybe, political capital and, certainly, the millions of dollars involved in participating in the playoff for a public university in their state.
Michigan beat Alabama and Washington with a team built on defense and the running game, making Florida State fans curious about why their team needed a star quarterback to enter the competition.4
Florida State got to play in a consolation game against Georgia. 23 Seminoles opted out after they were told their undefeated season did not earn them the opportunity to contend for a title.
Georgia won 63-3. That is the worst bowl defeat, but it does not disqualify them from consideration as team of the year.5 The game was awful. I watched, sort of. But the committee said that wasn’t the same team that earned those 13 wins. They were told it was over, so players looked ahead to the next meaningful stage of their careers in the NFL or at other programs.
Florida State fans pointed out that Michigan’s J.J. McCarthy threw for 140 yards in the Wolverines’ championship victory and Brock Glenn threw for 139 yards in a shellacking with a ghost town of a roster. The performances are not equal, but fans saw similar numbers and heard echoes of how losing their quarterback would doom their team.
I found an F-bomb laden diss track by a rapper named Trub Lyfe. The video title plays off the “Michigan Vs. Everybody” campaign; just sub in Florida State. He sports a garnet-and-gold Delvin Cook jersey while directing expletives at playoff coaches and programs (and his brother for being a Gators fan). This production captures the anger of a frothing fanbase who doesn’t buy the committee’s logical argument because they aren’t having a logical experience. They’re having an emotional one.
And I found an acoustic lament by Aubrey Wollett that wonders about an “I” in team and conference bias, then peaks with this question: “When did football turn into figure skating?” She’s referring to the subjective nature of choosing one team over the other, of performances that earned scores from judges, of the “eye test” versus results on the field.
The short answer: it always has been. College football has been the least objective awarder of national championships in the entire sports landscape for decades. For most of the sport’s history, multiple polls voted how they wanted at the end of each season. Sometimes the results matched up. Sometimes they didn’t.
In 1998, the Bowl Championship Series chose two teams to compete for the BCS Championship. The invisible bracket involved human’s doing their eye tests and computers crunching numbers to spit out the best two teams each year, and everybody agreed to crown that winner as the winner each season.6
Only that didn’t work very well because what happens when more than two teams feel like they deserve a shot? When we’ve got too many zero-loss contenders?
So in 2014, the College Football Playoff took over, increasing the number of participants by 100%, but keeping that number slightly lower than the number of Power Five conference champions.
So somebody always needed to be judged.
And here we are at the end of the four-team era. Mike Norvell’s rebuild of Florida State led to his first undefeated season as a head coach, which coincided with an abundance of playoff-caliber teams right before the shortage of spots ended.7
The 2023 Florida State Seminoles were ACC champions and undefeated in 2023, only falling on New Year’s Day of 2024, with half a roster against a team that held the top spot and lost one game in three seasons.
Next season’s fifth-ranked team will get a home game in the opening round of the expanded 12-team field.
These Seminoles are the last snub in major sports history.
Playoff fields are big enough to avoid leaving out elite squads. We’ll never see a 100-win MLB team miss the playoffs again. The NFL field will include 9-8 teams as 7th seeds. Many NCAA tournaments outside of football include 64 teams, the Platonic ideal number for a bracket.8
Next year’s CFP will stir debate about the twelfth spot, near the fringe of contention not the core of the championship conversation.
Florida State earns the Thrill Shot Team of the Year because they lost their quarterback and won anyway. Then they lost their quarterback and won anyway. And when logic said to leave them out, so many objective observers felt differently.
Watching sports is, at its core, an emotional experience wrapped in a layer of analytics and statistics, and these Seminoles show how important a thrill shot is by showing what it feels like to experience one, to earn one and not get to follow through to the end.
Runner-Up of the Year: Philadelphia Eagles
The 14-3 Eagles won the NFC East, then the NFC and kept pace with Patrick Mahomes and the 14-3 Chiefs until the final two minutes of Super Bowl LVII.
A defensive holding penalty on Eagles cornerback James Bradbury at 1:48 deflated the game and the Eagles’ season. Kansas City ran the clock down and kicked a field goal with :08 on the clock, and quarterback Jalen Hurts’s last heave at :06 came up short.
Hurts won the NFL MVP and signed an enormous contract. The Eagles made the Brotherly Shove (or, if you prefer, the Tush Push) a rugby-style short-yardage weapon. They nearly beat the defining quarterback of this era, then continued winning into the 2023 season — until they didn’t. The 2023 Eagles won 10 of 11, then lost 6 of 7 and exited the playoffs in the first round.
The Runner-Up of the Year goes to the “E-A-G-L-E-S Eagles!” because they are a reminder of how greatness can run out of time, and that we don’t know how long a great team will stay that way.
Dominator of the Year: Oklahoma Sooners Softball
Georgia won a second straight College Football Playoff as an undefeated champion, then extended that winning streak until the 2023 SEC championship game.9
Manchester City won the treble: the UEFA Champions League, the English Premier League and the FA Cup in the spring. They took home the FIFA Club World Cup in December.
The Las Vegas Aces won the WNBA clash of the super teams by defeating the New York Liberty and claiming back-to-back championships.
Florida State’s women’s soccer team won 22 games, drew one and lost none. The Seminoles won their fourth title since 2014 with a 5-1 defeat of Stanford, who also entered the title game without a loss.
But I’m going with the 61-1 Oklahoma Sooners softball team.
A three-peat and five of the last seven titles. Only Man City can compare with the longevity of the Sooners’ recent dominance. But it’s that lone loss in 2023 that got me. Softball, like baseball, just doesn’t work like that. Scrolling through the list of past winners reveals plenty of single-digit loss teams, but 2023 Oklahoma is the only one with one.
Player of the Year: Madisen Skinner, Texas Women’s Volleyball
Of all the great players I watched last year, one kept coming back to my mind for this reason: in the championship game against Nebraska, I — a relative volleyball novice — knew that the ball would find Madisen Skinner, and I started to understand that there was little the Huskers could do to deal with that.
More than Mahomes orchestrating the Chiefs or Erling Haaland as Man City’s scoring threat, Skinner defined her team’s championship success.
Texas maneuvered the ball to find their star outside hitter, and she swung her taped fingers to crush 16 kills. When Skinner served, the ball knuckled and made elite opponents look like they didn’t know how to receieve a serve.
When I watched the title game, the first to be broadcast on ABC, I knew that I was watching a young but elite Nebraska team that lost one match, won 33 and hosted the largest audience for a women’s sporting event back in August.
But, as the match continued, I gravitated towards Skinner among all those elite players. She was everywhere, and we all knew the ball would find her, and she won her third national title anyway.10
Architect of the Year: Yael Averbuch, Gotham City FC
If I could choose one player or team from this list as the focus for a full story, it would be the decision-maker at the center of Gotham City’s worst-to-first championship narrative.11
Okay, it’s worst-to-sixth-to-first. The NWSL’s last place team in 2022 improved from 4-17-1, 13 points and a -30 goal differential to 8-7-7, 31 points, a +1 goal differential and a playoff spot.
Averbuch overhauled the coaching staff, installing former Tottenham Hotspur coach Juan Carlos Amorós and a staff with international experience.
During the offseason, Averbuch added USWNT and NWSL championship pedigree to the roster by acquiring Lynn Williams, Kelley O’Hara, Yazmeen Ryan, and Abby Smith. She also drafted 2023 Rookie of the Year Jenna Nighswonger.
During the season, Esther González, Spanish World Cup winner and career goalscoring leader at Real Madrid, joined along with her national teammate Maitane López and former Liverpool striker Katie Stengel.
The new mix finished in the final playoff spot, then beat three prestigious NWSL clubs (North Carolina Courage, Portland Thorns and OL Reign) to earn USWNT defender Ali Krieger a championship in her final year in the league.
After winning the 2023 title, Averbuch continued to add star power to the roster. 2023 NWSL runners-up Rose Lavelle and Emily Sonnett signed with the champions, along with fellow USWNT players Crystal Dunn and Tierna Davidson.
When Gotham City officially introduced the four new Bats, West indicated that the lineup of US internationals falls in place with the continued evolution of the club.
“I’m from this area of the country,” West said, “and we really want to embody the New Jersey/New York mindset, which is [that] we want to be the best and we want other people chasing us.
“We want that target on our back.”
Thrill Shot readers, this is important: we do not assume that development is linear. Think back to great teams everyone thought would conquer the league for years, then followed up with no additional titles. Averbuch’s Gotham lineup could run the league, earn the top seed and succumb to the chaos of knockout playoffs next year. The free agent concoction could prove volatile. Injuries could strike. Nothing is guaranteed.
But I’m fascinated by her process and her attitude. She built a team that could sneak a championship as an underdog, and she’s building a new one that could fulfill championship expectations as a favorite.
Moment of the Year (If I grew up in Europe instead of the United States): van Gerwen & Smith, World Darts Championship Final
I named Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout’s showdown in the final out of the World Baseball Classic as the Moment of the Year. I stand by that as landmark moment in sports history, but I also admit that I’m an American who grew up loving baseball.
So let’s pretend that I didn’t for a moment. Let’s say I grew up in England, and instead of playing catch with my dad, we played darts at the pub.
If that was the true, then I would’ve named Michael van Gerwen and Michael Smith’s 9-darter showdown in the 2023 World Darts Championship final as the Moment of the Year.
The commentators in the moment call it the best leg of darts. A 9-darter is a perfect game. Now we’ve got two possible 9-darters? In the final? Of the World Championship?
The only way it could be better would be if it happened as Ohtani and Trout’s clash did: as the conclusion to the championship battle. There’s still a long way to go in this match (Smith eventually wins 7-4) but watch this beautiful exchange of precision and excitement.12
I hope this gives you an idea of what Thrill Shot will look for in 2024. I’ll be all over the sports scene in search of the best teams, players and moments.
If your favorite champion (or runner-up) didn’t make my list, let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear about your Of The Years from 2023.
The illustration for this story is by Lana Rozema. She’s a former student of mine, and I’m grateful that she created that image of a sad coach. Check out her art Instagram here.
This designation matters in college football. There’s a top division in the top division. The Power Five generally recruits at a higher level than the Group of Five, so everyone is generally fine with undefeated Group of Five teams being left out. The problem this year was that a Power Five champion with a legacy of success suddenly fell into the realm of uncertainty usually reserved for schools with smaller profiles and lesser legacies.
Please don’t read this as me saying Kansas or Oklahoma State would’ve earned a playoff spot if they topped that four-team group. They each lost other games. These were the common opponents that made it easy to rule out the Sooners in favor of the Longhorns.
It doesn’t really matter that Ohio State gave up zero points and Florida State only gave up six more. The entire sport is quarterback-centric.
This argument overlooks J.J. McCarthy’s Rose Bowl MVP performance: 17/27 for 221 yards, three touchdowns and zero turnovers. Okay, those aren’t the gaudy numbers that Michael Penix, Jr. put up for Washington against Texas, but McCarthy played well.
We don’t need to say “the worst bowl defeat ever” or “the world bowl defeat in college football history.” There has never been a worse defeat in a bowl game, so we’ll leave it at that.
Except when Central Florida claimed a 2017 national championship after finishing as the only undefeated FBS team. They were not invited to the playoff that season, but they beat Alabama’s rival Auburn in the Peach Bowl.
Go back up and watch the Florida State watch party video again. Norvell sits in an isolated little space. He gets a moment to process the bad news, then springs into leadership mode. I wish the feed stayed with him to hear how he handled that with his players.
That’s too many for football. I’d say 12 is about right for a weekly sport that includes the risk of traumatic injury.
My take here: Georgia was actually one of the four best teams, but the committee had too many elite options according to CFP selection protocol and not enough leverage to just say “But the Bulldogs are awesome” and put them in. If Alabama beat Texas, then I think we’re talking about Florida State getting snubbed for the SEC runner-up.
The first came with Kentucky in 2020. Her second was last year after transferring to her home-state school. During the broadcast, I remember the announcers, and possibly sideline reporter Holly Rowe, talking about how transferring to Texas helped Skinner rekindle her love for volleyball. I couldn’t find the quote again, so I’m sticking it down her.
I found a fantastic profile of West that I wanted to share with you on The Messenger, but that organization recently shut down. That profile is no longer available. It included info about her playing days, which included time at Sky Blue FC, a previous incarnation of Gotham City that sounds like a generic team in a video team that couldn’t get official team licensing. That league folded, but West found her way back to NY/NJ and started building from a former player’s perspective, and it’s fascinating to see her project grow.
I wrote one darts story, and the presentation blew me away. The pacing makes for a fantastic watching experience. And I have this theory that part of the reason we love sports is the ball in flight, the time it takes from launch to landing, that empty space where everything is possible. Darts has that, and I love it. More darts please.