The last time an SEC school didn’t make the College Football Playoff national championship game was the first time the CFP was held. Ohio State won that year. The Buckeyes beat Oregon.

But then you probably don’t need a reminder about the SEC’s dominance. The conference reminds us plenty. So do the results.

Since that first year — 2014 — the SEC won six titles. Yet wait, it gets worse: Entering this season, SEC schools have won 13 of the last 17 national titles.

Which makes Monday’s game between Michigan football and Washington a nice bookend to the end of the CFP as we know it. Next year, eight more teams join the CFP. Maybe that gives an upstart like Liberty the chance to ... ah, who are we kidding?

It’s about talent. Elite talent, and lots of it. In fact, of the nine teams that have won the national championship since the beginning of the CFP in 2014, none were outside the top 10 in accumulative recruiting rankings.

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And most years, the champion was among the top two teams in recruiting. The last three winners — Georgia, twice, and Alabama — shared the top two spots in 247Sports Composite recruiting rankings the last three seasons.

The Crimson Tide held the top spot this season and had 18 five-star and 56 four-star recruits on its roster. Consider Michigan’s ranking this season: 14th. Then consider this gap: the Wolverines have just three players on their roster that were five-star prospects coming out of high school: J.J. McCarthy, Donovan Edwards and Will Johnson.

Which means Alabama had five times as many. And you wonder why so many figured the Crimson Tide would win the Rose Bowl last week?

No, it wasn’t just because of Nick Saban. He’s a great coach. He’s also had much of the best talent, year over year.

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U-M's presence in the title game isn’t the first time a team with a composite recruiting ranking outside the top 10 will compete for a championship. TCU met that metric just last year.

It is the first time both teams playing for the title are outside that top 10. This is, among other things, refreshing.

Not because there is anything wrong with securing five-star talent; this is the goal of every program, obviously. But because in so many of these playoffs the champion felt like a foregone conclusion. U-M and Washington are disrupting a pattern, and college football is better for it.

If the pattern had held, Alabama and Texas would be playing tomorrow night at NRG Stadium. If you were wondering, the Longhorns ranked sixth in the composite recruiting rankings.

As for the Washington Huskies?

They rank No. 26.

Or three spots lower than Michigan State when the Spartans made the CFP in 2015. The Spartans had top-tier offensive and defensive lines that season and competed with Alabama in the semis up front.

Yet they didn’t have the same level of skill players on offense or on the back end of the defense. Teams that rank this low in the composite rankings usually have weaknesses in a few areas.

It’s hard to be great everywhere.

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The Wolverines are. Or at least they are good to great everywhere. This makes them an outlier of sorts, and why Jim Harbaugh and his staff get so much credit — rightfully so — for developing players.

Kalen DeBoer has done similar things at Washington. His Huskies aren’t as balanced through every position group as the Wolverines. But they are singularly great in the passing game, good in the running game, and just opportunistic enough defensively.

DeBoer’s Huskies knocked off a team in the semis with nine more five-stars, though that difference doesn’t explain everything, because Washington has zero five-stars on its roster. So how did the Huskies get here?

A transfer quarterback in Michael Penix Jr., three four-and-three-star receivers who have developed into serious legitimate NFL prospects, and an offensive line that is among the best in the nation, in part because it's stacked with four-star recruits.

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This matters, of course. Four-star recruits are often not much different from five-star recruits and, as with any level of sport, great players can come from anywhere. Think of the NFL, where the first round of the draft might be the “five-star” players, but the second and third rounds routinely produce Pro Bowl-level talent.

Recruiting rankings, then, are speculative as much as they are indicative. These are high school players. And it’s hard to guess how every top recruit will evolve and adapt. The same is true when it comes to evaluating college players for the pros.

Some don’t work out. Some take time to develop. Coaching matters. Organizational culture and structure matter.

Harbaugh and DeBoer are reminders. So are their teams. Not that Harbaugh is concerned with composite recruiting rankings or the perception that his Big Ten — soon to be DeBoer’s conference, too, when Washington joins in the fall — doesn't offer a true test of football like the SEC does because the five-stars largely live South.

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He was asked Saturday about the notion that his team and the Huskies weren’t expected to knock off their five-star laden semifinal opponents, and what that says about the Big Ten?

“No real thoughts about that,” he said. “... that's a great question, though.”

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For so long, it’s been the question, about what it would take for a couple of teams to crash the five-star party. Turns out it took one of the best offenses in recent memory and a team of largely three-and-four-star recruits to develop into future NFL prospects.

The Wolverines have them in bunches.

Finally, a new way. Or at least for this season, a different way.

Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan football, Washington show there's new path to championship