COLUMBUS, Ohio — Not entertained?
No, you probably aren’t.
Four first-round college football playoff games, four results by at least two points. Two of them were absolute blowouts (in State College and Columbus), a third was a blocker-turned fiasco with two late touchdowns (in South Bend), and a fourth in Austin featured our only cliffhangers in the fourth quarter (thanks, Clemson). .
Here in Columbus, the Buckeyes left us wondering a couple of things after a 42-17 blowout of Tennessee:
Why couldn’t they do this against Michigan?
Have they once again been the favorites to win it all?
Maybe they are! After all, no other college squad has more talent, as we were reminded Saturday night as the first series of College Football Playoff games on campus wrapped up.
Let’s take a look at how ugly this got so quickly. Ohio State’s first punt came with four minutes left in the second quarter. Tennessee’s first completion came six minutes into the second quarter. Suddenly, it was 21-0 and the more than 25,000 Tennessee fans who made the trip north were left angry and shivering in a sub-20-degree wind chill.
The Buckeyes (11-2) showed what they can do when they’re cooking, and boy, were they cooking. By cooking, we mean targeting two of the most explosive and talented receivers in the country. Jeremiah Smith and Emeka Egbuka paced the Vols for 11 receptions and nearly 200 yards.
Add in an Ohio State defensive front that overran first-year starter Nico Iamaleava and the Buckeyes were on their way to a victory that should reduce the heat on Ryan Day’s pressure cooker from boiling to less boiling. Afterward, even Day acknowledged that he and the coaching staff called Saturday’s game “more aggressive” than the last outing here against Michigan.
“You are defined by how you handle adversity in life,” he said. “To see the way they responded, they had a look in their eyes.”
What’s next: A rematch against Big Ten champion Oregon in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day – a glorious matchup of a team with the best resume in college football against a team with the most talented roster in college football.
The last time they met, in October, the Ducks won 32-31 on a last-second finish in a thriller in Eugene. Whether these two should meet again this early in a 12-team playoff is certainly a question worth pondering.
But, unfortunately, that’s what the format offers. Instead of ranking teams based on the CFP selection committee’s rankings, the format calls for the four highest-ranked conference champions to be those ranked 1 through 4, a rule that, while understandable as an incentive for the league champions, creates an unbalanced standings.
For example, the committee’s No. 6 ranked team, Ohio State, was seeded eighth and now faces the top seed in the quarterfinals. The format is likely to undergo changes, potentially starting with this same qualifying rule that grants byes only to conference champions, as explained in this story last week.
But back to those blowouts.
The ACC was eliminated in the first round, its champion was defeated by the runner-up of the SEC, and its runner-up was crushed by the runner-up of the Big Ten (if you’re debating the strength of the conference, those results should be helpful). 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 pretty easily.
In total, the winners scored 145 points and the losers 68. All the higher seeds and the local teams won.
Chalk, that’s what they call it.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that these teams (SMU and Indiana, in particular) should have missed the playoff field. Maybe it just means that, at least this year in college football, the gap between those great teams and those good teams is greater than we first thought.
This is not completely new. Don’t you remember all those CFP semifinals from the last decade? Fourteen of the 20 semi-final matchups resulted in results of at least two scores. Eight of them were blowouts of at least three touchdowns.
It happens.
But what it does tell us, as someone here in the Ohio Stadium press box whispered to this writer: “Maybe this will show everyone that we shouldn’t expand any further.”
Fourteen teams? Sixteen?
Maybe not.
And now it’s 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 face Texas in the Peach Bowl and the Broncos face Penn State in the Fiesta. Boise State and ASU were ranked 9th and 12th by the committee, but they got 3rd and 4th because of that pesky conference title rule we mentioned earlier.
Can you deliver? As underdogs to the big sports brands, they will have many across the country rooting for them.
Meanwhile, in Pasadena, we will have what many expected in the preseason as perhaps a national title showdown: Oregon vs. Ohio State.
It’s a delightful duel, set against the backdrop of the sun setting over the San Gabriel Mountains. In fact, as midnight rolled around here in Columbus, Rose Bowl officials prepared dozens of single-cut roses to hand out to Ohio State players and coaches.
What a difference those three weeks make, huh? The last game here ended in an embarrassing flag-planting fight 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 dishearten some fans here. .
“You can’t just quit the game,” Day said. “You identify the problems and let the players talk. You make a plan to fix these things. Saying that it doesn’t weigh on you, yes. “These guys have a lot of pride.”
Despite the efforts of Ohio State administrators, many Buckeyes fans sold out of this playoff fight. Visiting teams get 3,500 tickets to CFP first-round games. The Vols brought at least 25,000 people, turning this 102,000-seat stadium orange. There were more visiting fans than some veteran Ohio State reporters had ever seen in this place.
By the start of the fourth quarter, many of them had left and walked out into the cold night for the ride down Interstate 71 after having suffered the ugliest of the first-round beatings. After all, OSU outgained Tennessee 473-256 and played its third and fourth quarterbacks in the final minutes.
As a final farewell on this cold Saturday night, the Ohio State stadium operators played over the speakers a familiar refrain for those in orange: Rocky Top.
They returned to Tennessee. And the Buckeyes go to Los Angeles, who achieved the most overwhelming victory of this historic weekend in this sport.