Welcome to the Madness: Ohio State Validates Playoff with Upset of Alabama
Take a bow, selection committee. You too, Bill Hancock. And you too, ESPN, for dumping an ungodly amount of money into this “radical” idea for a college football postseason and sticking the landing.
Please take a few days off. Take these flowers. Here, enjoy these free drink tickets, all on us. You’ve earned them. It’s the least we can do for giving us the College Football Playoff, an experiment that has already proved to be invaluable after only eight spectacular hours and one magnificent, monumental upset.
Ohio State’s 42-35 Sugar Bowl win over mighty Alabama—an upset no one outside Columbus could have predicted with any true confidence—wasn’t just wildly entertaining. It wasn’t just extra college football being played with two quality teams.
.jpg?w=256 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
It was validation that the College Football Playoff—despite the strange, contentious and (at times) frustrating path to arrive to Jan. 1—was a colossal success in its first year. It might not be perfect just yet, and it probably never will be, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop hugging it for a while.
Go on, we understand.
In a different era—you have to go all the way back to last year—our national championship would’ve been served to us on a worn-out, BCS-engraved platter by a computer formula.
The teams, had the BCS still been fully operational for another year, would have been No. 1 Alabama and No. 2 Florida State with no semifinal barrier to get through. We would have felt for the No. 3 team, Oregon, although we would have accepted the title game for what it was after a few hours of heated debate.
It was all we knew; we were so naive way back then.
Ohio State would have been a really wonderful story and nothing more. Urban Meyer's team closed out the year with a third-string quarterback in Cardale Jones—wow, imagine that!—and we would have celebrated its trip to the Rose Bowl. This Rose Bowl wouldn’t have been a playoff semifinal, of course, but rather another exhibition, albeit one with brighter lights and bigger sponsor dollars.
The Buckeyes, left for dead before the season began after losing their star quarterback, Braxton Miller—and left for dead once more after losing their next star quarterback, J.T. Barrett—would have played one game and been done. The results of this contest wouldn’t have mattered, and it would have been on to next season.
Remember these days? I hope you do because it wasn’t that long ago.
Under old guidelines, Thursday doesn’t happen. The national championship between Oregon and Ohio State on Jan. 12 doesn’t happen. Urban Meyer’s reaction to news of an Oregon blowout doesn’t happen, which would have been a tremendous loss.
We broke free of the formula, and the end result is unexpected mayhem of the most welcomed kind.
Think about it: The first-ever No. 4 seed in the first-ever College Football Playoff—a team that snuck in after delivering a timely blowout of the most unexpected kind—just conquered the sport’s tallest, widest and strongest giant with a quarterback who has yet to start in his first regular-season collegiate game.
It did it behind Jones’ arm and his legs. The third-string quarterback—which is a label we should probably just drop at this point—finished with 243 yards passing, 43 yards rushing and a touchdown. It didn’t hurt to have Ezekiel Elliott in the backfield, either. Elliott finished with 230 yards rushing and two scores, looking the part of the best player on the field.
If I told you that Jones and Elliott would account for more than 500 yards of offense in a semifinal win over Alabama back in late September, what would your response have been other than asking that I be committed?
Even if you’re an Alabama fan feeling the effects of larynx-destroying “Run the dang ball, Kiffin!” cries, you can still (hopefully) appreciate what this Ohio State team was about to accomplish.
""We're gonna do the best we can to represent the Big 10 & the great state of Ohio" -Urban Meyer #SugarBowl pic.twitter.com/T1lEHXUZop
— ESPN CollegeFootball (@ESPNCFB) January 2, 2015"
And if you’re simply a fan of college football, Thursday night's developments should have you encouraged about the future of the sport’s postseason.
There will be tweaks along the way in the selection process—and the debates over the number of teams included will surface every now and then, just like always—but the foundation is promising.
The distraction and controversy over the selection committee took away from the true value of the College Football Playoff. Finally, for the first time in the sport’s history, results and moments are running the show.
As we saw on Thursday, this is more powerful than any committee, poll or ranking.
No matter what size the playoff eventually settles at, the teams involved will always be hotly debated. But those same teams that are granted access for that year will have the opportunity to prove their worth in games that we can only hope will be as good as this one.
Enjoy the time off, selection committee. And don’t worry, Bill Hancock, we'll forget about the fact that you fought this playoff for so long. In fact, here’s an extra drink ticket to show you there are no hard feelings.
.jpg?w=480 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
