Kalen DeBoer considers what it means to have national championship without team from the South

College football is a sport that tends to be very regional and in recent years it’s a sport that has been dominated by southern programs. This season, though, there won’t be a team from the South in the championship game when Washington and Michigan meet each other in Houston.

However, for Huskies head coach Kalen DeBoer, it doesn’t so much matter where the teams are from but reaching their goal to get to the championship game in the first place.

“I guess I don’t get caught up in that,” Kalen DeBoer said. “For us, it was our personal goal to get here and we were going to play whoever we had to play in the semifinals and whoever was next. And that’s Michigan right now. We’re just blessed to be in this position to be able to play the game.”

During the College Football Playoff era, nine of the ten champions have come from the South. The last champion not from the South was Ohio State in 2014, who played Oregon in a similar Big Ten vs. Pac-12 matchup to this season’s championship game.

For Kalen DeBoer, the change in where the teams playing for a championship came from this season goes to show the parity in the sport this season.

“So, I think it says a lot about the parity of college football and how many teams could be in this spot. I think that was something that was noted, I think, especially in the latter half of the season as undefeated teams still were holding on, and that next wave of maybe one-loss teams was really strong and doing well. So it says a lot about college football that you have different teams finding their ways to get to this game.”

Now, the question is whether or not this change is the exception that proves the rule or the start of a new trend. On top of that, changes in the sport like conference realignment, the expanded Playoff, NIL, and the Transfer Portal could change the dynamic of the sport further.

Some of those changes are already apparent on Washington and Michigan’s rosters in how they’ve used NIL and the Transfer Portal to build their rosters to get to this point.

Kalen DeBoer on the state of college football

Amid all of the changes in college football, Kalen DeBoer shared his thoughts on the state of the sport.

“There’s a lot happening, and I think it will never end. There’s going to be something. It might not be that conference alignment is maybe hot at the time or something kind of gets tweaked with the portal and all that. There is a lot going on,” DeBoer said.

“I think that the coaches, the programs that can continue to evolve with the times and adjust, those are the ones that are going to be most successful. But I don’t have a perfect answer on what the fix is. Certainly willing to be a part of committees or whatever it might be to talk through and working with the coaches across the country to make the little tweaks year to year that need to be done and to try to stay away from those unfortunate situations that have popped up — not just this year, but in the past couple of years.”