College football playoff should go through Arlington, Texas

If the Cowboys had squirmed past Alabama into the Big Bowl last season, their reward would have been a New Orleans title match against, yep, LSU.

So amid the fanfare of the historic announcement Tuesday that college football will expand its playoff system to four teams, don't forget this glorious bonus.

Arlington, Texas, is in line to join the rotation. The road to a national title soon will go through Greater Dallas, either with the title game or a semifinal or both.

And that's not just a good thing. “Great thing,” said OU athletic director Joe Castiglione.

Starting with the 2014 season, the national title game will be offered to the highest bidder, and the two national semifinals will rotate between six bowls.

Jerry Jones' ears have more than perked up. According to The Dallas Morning News, Jones already has formed a nonprofit partnership with the Cotton Bowl and his Cowboys Stadium to go after college football's plum games.

All kinds of cities have expressed interest in chasing the Big Bowl, now that college football's title game will be outside the structure of the sport's traditional bowl games. Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Detroit, Tampa, St. Louis. Plus you know New Orleans, Atlanta, Miami, Houston, Phoenix and Los Angeles will chase, too.

But who has a better hand than Jones? The world's greatest stadium. Organizing bodies like the Cotton Bowl and the Cowboys franchise that know how to put on postseason games. And a willingness to spend money to make money, as Jones has proved with big payouts for regular-season games like OU-Brigham Young, Texas A&M-Arkansas and Michigan-Alabama.

Perhaps only Atlanta can match Arlington as a college football locale with so much going for it, and Arlington wins that matchup by a landslide on the stadium.

Plus, Jones will have a thirst to get the new Big Bowl on a regular basis, to make up for the Super Bowl fiasco of 17 months ago, when a storm-of-the-century iced down Dallas and the game was marred by a temporary-bleacher debacle.

There seems no chance Arlington won't be part of the new playoff order. Which means Big 12 country finally will have a stake in the ground, after trying decades of contesting national championships in Florida and Louisiana and California and Arizona.

And that's superb news for OU and OSU, which are easy access from Dallas for recruiting or ballgames.