This is an opinion column.

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Per tradition, the year in review for 2023 will begin with a public shaming.

The four teams in the final four-team College Football Playoff are Alabama, Michigan, Washington and Texas. Alabama and Michigan are in the Rose Bowl semifinal game on New Year’s Day while Washington and Texas square off in the Sugar Bowl. Nowhere to be found among those competitors is the team that I picked to win the SEC. That would be Texas A&M, which fired coach Jimbo Fisher along the way to a 7-5 record.

For those wondering, Texas A&M plays Oklahoma State on Wednesday in the TaxAct Texas Bowl (8 p.m. on ESPN).

There were big hopes in Aggieland when Fisher pulled in the No.1-rated recruiting class back in 2022. Success on the field never matched the outsized expectations created by those ratings, though, and so after buying all those recruits, Texas A&M’s wealthy boosters decided to pay Fisher to go away with a buyout of over $75 million.

If that wasn’t desperate enough, Texas A&M then hired the coach at Duke based off a 7-5 season.

People thought the pandemic years were slightly unhinged. They were just warm-ups for college football. How absolutely insane was the year of 2023 for the sport of constantly evolving chaos? Of all the belligerently ridiculous things to happen this past year, Fisher’s buyout might not even be in the Top 5.

Start with Cal and Stanford. The two Northern California schools — known for things like intelligence and wisdom — made the brilliant decision to join the Atlantic Coast Conference. Don’t try to overthink it. It makes no sense. Those pillars of education needed a conference for their football teams to call home, though, after the Pac-12 imploded upon itself.

The year in sports that was 2023 had plenty of unexpected twists. For example, international soccer star Messi joined the Major League Soccer team Inter Miami CF. If we’re being completely honest, that was the biggest story in American sports this past year. I mean, other than Taylor Swift dating Travis Kelce, of course.

The saddest, weirdest, most unnecessary story in the world of sports? Florida State might disagree, but the demise of the Pac-12 — above everything else — was college football’s crown jewel of crazy in 2023.

The Pac-12 was known as the “League of Champions.” RIP. In 2024, it all goes away. The conference dissolved after its university presidents couldn’t secure a lucrative-enough television deal. Turns out, the West Coast games just aren’t worth as much to television executives.

What killed the Pac-12 in the end? Some will say greed. Some will say hubris. It was actually just geography, time zones and human physiology.

The problem with the Pac-12 wasn’t that the football lacked excitement or appeal. The product on the field had nothing to do with it at all. It’s just that football fans on the East Coast start drinking too early on Saturday, and by the time all those Pac-12 games get started everyone is already passed out.

If only Colorado had hired Deion Sanders a year earlier, then maybe the Pac-12 would have been saved.

We can’t have a column about college football in 2023 without mentioning Coach Prime. He brought the party to the Pac-12 just as the league was turning off the lights. The Buffaloes started off the season with upset victories against TCU and Nebraska. Do-everything superstar Travis Hunter was then injured against Colorado State and Coach Prime’s team was never the same again.

Hunter will be an early favorite to win the Heisman Trophy in 2024. In 2023, the award went to LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels. Daniels put up some outrageous offensive statistics … just not against Florida State’s defense.

We’ll always remember 2023 for being the year that SEC commissioner Greg Sankey bullied the College Football Playoff committee into taking Alabama over Florida State despite the Seminoles going undefeated all year (and 2-0 against SEC teams). FSU didn’t take the snub very well, and the politicians in Tallahassee then overreacted to a situation they didn’t fully understand. Now FSU is apparently trying to leave the ACC just as Cal and Stanford are coming in.

How will things play out in 2024? It’s impossible to know, but precedents have been set. If we learned anything at all from college football’s leaders in 2023, it’s that cheating is still discouraged but punishments all depend on TV ratings.

Just ask Michigan.

Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of the most controversial sports book ever written, “We Want Bama”. It’s a love story about wild times, togetherness and rum.