Aren’t we glad the new expanded College Football Playoff is free from controversy?

Random notes:

▪ I’m sure glad expanding the College Football Playoff field to 12 teams eliminated all the controversy surrounding the previous four-team field.

NCAA Basketball Tournament fans know, that even with a 68-team field that may expand to 76, there will always be controversy.

▪ After all the moaning and groaning from ESPN’s college football analysts about the competitive level of the first-round games, it was refreshing to hear reasonable takes from Joe Buck and Troy Aikman on “Monday Night Football.”

“I think the disappointment is for those that want to question whether those teams belong,” Aikman said. “We see teams in the Super Bowl that lose by large margins.”

“I think what it does is it diminishes the job that the teams that won did,” Buck said.

Buck and Aikman are pros. In more ways than one.

▪ My takeaway from the CFP first round: More games in home stadiums. Please.

▪ Of the four CFP games last Saturday the only double-digit betting point spread was Texas by 12.5 over Clemson. Notre Dame was a 6.5-point favorite over Indiana; Penn State an 8.5-point favorite over SMU and Ohio State a 7.5-point favorite over Tennessee.

▪ I don’t care if Indiana lost by 50 points to Notre Dame, I’d rather see the Hoosiers in the CFP than an Alabama team that lost 24-3 at Oklahoma.

▪ If you hear a Kentucky football fan grumble that the best the Cats could do in the quarterback portal is a player from Incarnate Word in Zach Calzada, remind them that first-team AP All-America quarterback Cam Ward began his college career at Incarnate Word before transferring to Washington State and then Miami.

Calzada is also well-traveled. The Georgia native played two years at Texas A&M and was on the Auburn roster for one year before succeeding Ward at Incarnate Word in San Antonio.

▪ Kentucky’s most important portal addition may be Bowling Green offensive tackle Alex Wollschlaeger. Seriously.

▪ No surprise that UK cornerback Maxwell Hairston has declared for the NFL draft. ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. projects Hairston as the seventh-best cornerback in the 2025 draft.

▪ Kiper’s top 10 positional draft rankings, updated Dec. 12, do not include UK’s Deone Walker.

▪ Lexington native Walker Buehler clearly is betting on himself by signing a 1-year, $21 million deal with the Boston Red Sox. Coming off his second Tommy John surgery, Walker struggled before finding his form in a big way to help the Los Angeles Dodgers win the World Series.

▪ Here are SEC basketball’s losses in the month of December — Auburn lost to Duke; Kentucky lost to Clemson; Kentucky lost to Ohio State; LSU lost to SMU; Missouri lost to Illinois; Texas lost to UConn. Six losses. That’s it.

▪ Since beating then-No. 1 seed Ohio State 62-60 in the East Region semifinals of the 2011 NCAA Tournament, Kentucky is 0-3 vs. the Buckeyes. All three were in the CBS Sports Classic. The Cats lost 74-67 in Brooklyn in 2015; 71-65 in Las Vegas in 2019; 85-65 in New York this year.

▪ Kentucky lost so decisively at Madison Square Garden I didn’t even hear that much complaining from BBN about official Doug Shows. Well, not that much.

▪ The Cats shot 29.8 percent from the floor in the loss to Ohio State. That was just the seventh game in the last 20 years in which Kentucky shot less than 30 percent.

▪ Yes, that was former UK assistant Joel Justus on the Ohio State bench last Saturday. After two years at North Carolina State, Justus joined Jake Diebler’s staff as associate head coach in April.

▪ Eastern Kentucky’s basketball Colonels play at Louisville at noon on Saturday. You can catch the game on the CW. EKU is 6-6 after a 91-80 loss to Jacksonville State last Saturday. Louisville is 7-5 after winning 90-76 at Florida State on Saturday for coach Pat Kelsey’s first ACC win.

▪ Tough break for Louisville volleyball losing Anna DeBeer to an ankle injury before the championship match against Penn State. Without DeBeer, the Cardinals lost 3-1 to the Nittany Lions.

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