COLUMBUS, Ohio – Aren’t you entertained?
No, probably not.
Four games in the first round of the College Football Playoff, four results with at least two scores. Two of those were outright blowouts (at State College and Columbus), a third was a closer dud with two late touchdowns (at South Bend) and a fourth in Austin featured our only exciting moments in the fourth quarter (thanks, Clemson).
Here in Columbus, the Buckeyes left us wondering a few things after a 42-17 drubbing of Tennessee:
Why couldn’t they do this against Michigan?
Are they the favorites to win it all again?
Maybe they are! After all, no other college squad is more talented, as they reminded us Saturday night during college football’s first-ever series of playoff games.
Let’s see how ugly this got so quickly. Ohio State’s first kick came with four minutes left in the second quarter. Tennessee’s first pass completion came six minutes into the second quarter. Suddenly it was 21-0 and the 25,000-plus Tennessee fans who made the trip north were left angry and shivering in wind chills below 20 degrees.
The Buckeyes (11-2) showed what they can do when they’re cooking, and, boy, were they cooking? By cooking, we mean focusing on two of the most explosive and talented receivers in the country. Jeremiah Smith and Emeka Egbuka tore through the Vols for 11 catches and nearly 200 yards.
Toss in an Ohio State defensive front swarming first-year starter Nico Iamaleava and the Buckeyes were well on their way to a win that should lower the temperature on the Ryan Day Pressure Cooker from boiling to not so boiling. Afterward, even Day acknowledged that he and the coaching staff called Saturday’s game “more aggressive” than that last outing here against Michigan.
“You are defined by the way you handle adversities in life,” he said. “To see how they reacted, they looked into their eyes.”
Next up: a rematch against Big Ten champion Oregon in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day — a glorious matchup between a team with college football’s best resume against a team with college football’s most talented roster.
The last time they met, in October, the Ducks won 32-31 on a last-second thriller in Eugene. Whether these two should meet again so early in a 12-team playoff is certainly a question worth pondering.
But unfortunately, that’s what the format indicates. Rather than seeding teams based on the CFP selection committee’s rankings, the format calls for seeding the four highest-ranked conference champions at numbers 1-4 – a rule that, while understandable as an incentive for league champions, creates an unbalanced seeding creates.
For example, the committee’s No. 6-ranked team, Ohio State, was seeded eighth and will now face the top seed in the quarterfinals. Look for changes to the format, possibly starting with this seeding rule that awards byes only to conference champions, as explained in this story last week.
But back to those outbursts.
The ACC was eliminated in the first round, the champion was defeated by the SEC runner-up, and the runner-up was crushed by the Big Ten runner-up (if you’re talking about conference strength, those results would be helpful should be). The Big Ten’s third-best team defeated the SEC’s third-best team in Columbus. And Notre Dame handled the fourth-best team in the Big Ten quite easily.
In total, the winners scored 145 points and the losers 68. All higher series and home teams won.
Chalk, that’s what they call it.
This doesn’t necessarily mean these teams — especially SMU and Indiana — should have missed the playoff field. Maybe it just means that, in college football, at least this year, the divide between those great teams and those good teams is a bigger chasm than we first realized.
This is not entirely new. Don’t you remember all those CFP semifinals from the past decade? Fourteen of the twenty semi-final matches resulted in results of at least two scores. Eight of those were at least three-touchdown bursts.
It happens.
But what it does tell us is, as someone here whispered to this writer in the press box at Ohio Stadium: “Maybe this will show everyone that we shouldn’t expand anymore.”
Fourteen teams? Sixteen?
Maybe not.
And it’s now up to Boise State and Arizona State to avoid a nightmare for many college football fans and stakeholders: an All-SEC/Big Ten/Notre Dame semifinal.
The Sun Devils meet Texas in the Peach Bowl, and the Broncos meet Penn State in the Fiesta. Boise State and ASU were ranked No. 9 and No. 12 by committee, but were ranked third and fourth due to the pesky conference title rule we mentioned earlier.
Can they deliver? As underdogs against the sport’s big brands, there will be plenty of people rooting for them across the country.
Meanwhile, in Pasadena we get what many expected in the preseason, perhaps a national title game: Oregon vs. Ohio State.
It’s a delicious duel, against the backdrop of the sunset over the San Gabriel Mountains. As midnight struck here in Columbus, Rose Bowl officials prepared dozens of single-cut roses to present to Ohio State’s players and coaches.
What a difference those three weeks make, huh? The last game here ended in an embarrassing brawl with flags at midfield and a shocking loss to three-touchdown underdog Michigan – a fourth straight loss to the Wolverines in this heated rivalry series and one that seemed to turn off some fans here.
“You don’t just continue with the game,” Day said. “You identify the problems and let the players have their say. You have a plan in place to fix these things. To say it doesn’t bother you, it does. These guys are very proud.”
Despite efforts by the Ohio State board, many Buckeyes fans sold their tickets for this playoff battle. Visiting teams will receive 3,500 tickets for CFP first-round matches. The Vols brought at least 25,000 strong and painted this 102,000-seat stadium orange. There were more visiting fans than some longtime Ohio State reporters had ever seen at this venue.
By the start of the fourth quarter, many of them were gone, heading out into the cold night for the trip up Interstate 71 after suffering the ugliest blowouts of the first round. Finally, OSU defeated Tennessee 473-256 in yards and played its third series – third string -quarterback in the final minutes.
As a final farewell on this cold Saturday evening, Ohio State’s stadium operators played over the loudspeakers a familiar refrain for those in orange: Rocky Top.
Back to Tennessee they went. And off to LA go the Buckeyes, deliverers of the most crushing victory of this historic weekend in sports.
