COLUMBUS, Ohio — Are you not entertained?
No, you’re probably not.
Four College Football Playoff first-round games; four outcomes by at least two scores. Two of those were outright blowouts (in State College and Columbus), a third was a dud made closer with two late touchdowns (in South Bend) and a fourth in Austin featured our only suspenseful fourth-quarter moments (thank you, Clemson).
Here in Columbus, the Buckeyes left us wondering a couple of things after a 42-17 drubbing of Tennessee:
Why couldn’t they do this against Michigan?
Are they back to being the favorites to win it all?
Perhaps, they are! After all, no other college roster is more talented, as they reminded us Saturday night in capping college football’s first-ever slew of on-campus playoff games.
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 pass completion came six minutes into the second quarter. Suddenly, it was 21-0 and the more than 25,000 Tennessee fans who made the journey north were left angry and shivering in wind chills of 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 targeting 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 that swarmed first-year starter Nico Iamaleava and the Buckeyes were well on their way to a win that should lower the heat on the Ryan Day Pressure Cooker, from boiling to less boiling. Afterward, even Day acknowledged that he and the coaching staff called Saturday’s game “more aggressively” than that last outing here against Michigan.
“You’re defined by the way you handle adversity in life,” he said. “To see the way they responded, they had a look in their eye.”
Up next: a rematch against Big Ten champion Oregon in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day — a glorious matchup of a team with college football’s best resume against a team with college football’s most talented roster.
Last time they met, back in October, the Ducks won 32-31 on a last-second field goal in a thriller in Eugene. Whether these two should be meeting again so early in a 12-team playoff is certainly a question worth pondering.
But, alas, that’s what the format giveth. Instead of seeding teams based on the CFP selection committee’s rankings, the format calls for the four highest-ranked conference champions to be seeded Nos. 1-4 — a rule that, while understandable as an incentive for league champs, creates unbalanced seeding.
For instance, the committee’s No. 6-ranked team, Ohio State, was seeded eighth and now is pitted against the top seed in the quarterfinals. Look for the format to undergo changes, potentially starting with this very seeding rule that grants byes to only conference champions, as explained in this story last week.
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But back to those blowouts.
The ACC got knocked out in the first round, its champion downed by the SEC’s champion and its runner-up crushed by the Big Ten’s runner-up (if you’re debating conference strength, those results should be helpful). The Big Ten’s third-best team took down the SEC’s third-best team in Columbus. And Notre Dame quite easily handled the Big Ten’s fourth-best team.
In all, the winners scored 145 points and the losers 68. All higher seeds and home teams won.
Chalk, is what they call it.
This doesn’t necessarily mean these teams — SMU and Indiana, in particular — should have missed the playoff field. Perhaps it only means that, in college football at least this year, the separation between those great teams and those good teams is a wider gap than we first realized.
This isn’t completely new. Don’t you remember all those CFP semifinals the last decade? Fourteen of the 20 semifinal matchups resulted in outcomes of at least two scores. Eight of those were at least three-touchdown blowouts.
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 anymore.”
Fourteen teams? Sixteen?
Maybe not.
And it’s now up to Boise State and Arizona State to prevent 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 tangle with Penn State in the Fiesta. Boise State and ASU were ranked No. 9 and No. 12 by the committee but got the third and fourth seeds because of that pesky rule we earlier mentioned.
Can they deliver? As underdogs against the sport’s big brands, they’ll have plenty across the country rooting for them.
Meanwhile, in Pasadena, we’ll get what many expected in the preseason to maybe be a national title game matchup: Oregon vs. Ohio State.
It’s a mouthwatering duel, backdropped by the sunset over the San Gabriel Mountains. In fact, as midnight struck here in Columbus, Rose Bowl officials readied dozens of single cut roses to be handed to Ohio State players and coaches.
What a difference that three weeks makes, huh? The last game here ended in an embarrassing midfield flag-planting brawl and a shocking loss to three-touchdown underdog Michigan — a fourth consecutive defeat to the Wolverines in this heated rivalry series and one that seemed to turn off some fans here.
“You don’t just move on from the game,” Day said. “You identify the issues and let the players speak. You put a plan together to get these things fixed. To say it doesn’t weigh on you, it does. These guys have a lot of pride.”
Despite efforts from Ohio State administrators, many Buckeyes fans sold away their tickets to this playoff bout. Visiting teams get 3,500 tickets to CFP first-round games. The Vols brought at least 25,000 strong peppering this 102,000-seat stadium in orange. It was more visiting fans than some long-time Ohio State reporters had ever seen in this venue.
By the start of the fourth quarter, many of them were gone, exiting into the chilly night for the jaunt down Interstate-71 having suffered what was the ugliest of the first-round blowouts. After all, OSU out-gained Tennessee 473-256 in yards and played its third-string — third-string — quarterback in the final minutes.
As a final goodbye on this cold Saturday night, Ohio State stadium operators played over the speakers a familiar refrain for those in orange: Rocky Top.
Back to Tennessee they went. And off to L.A. go the Buckeyes, deliverers of the most crushing win of this historic weekend in the sport.
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