Cincinnati was fine, defense was elite, but they got overwhelmed by a team that's essentially all 5 stars. I love college football but the disparity between the elite and very good is wider in that sport than any other team sport.
Memory is bad but it feels like it got way worse than like early 2000s. Feels that way in basketball too, men and women.
I think the 90s and 2000s were much better for parity in college football than it was now. That era was far enough from the scholarship limit decrease where programs like K-State got to build their programs. Remember there was no CFP then and there were a lot of great programs that didn't get a chance to play for a national championship that were championship quality. You hear a lot of people pissed at the committee and wanting the BCS to select the teams but they forget the BCS was heavily influenced by they polls and you saw programs like OU, LSU, Florida, and Florida State getting picked to play in the BCS championship games with late losses because of the eye test bias.
You can point to one thing for the current state of the top heavy nature of college football and it was the explosion of money specifically in the SEC and Big 10 with the television contracts in the 2010s. That allowed blue blood programs to make even more money to not only hold on to the best coaches but they can take everyone else's and have significantly bigger staffs than everyone else.
When Oklahoma and Notre Dame can't compete with the top tier you know we're in a screwed up time.
