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PASADENA, Calif. – Several Ohio State players crouched behind Ryan Day before picking up a white bucket of red roses and dropping the petals on their trainer’s head. When he realized what was happening, Day grinned, his smile stretching all the way to his eyes.
Day, quite literally, stopped to smell the roses after the Buckeyes’ 41-21 win over No. 1 Oregon here in the quarterfinal round of the College Football Playoff. They’ll play Texas next in the Cotton Bowl with a trip to the national championship game on the line.
This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is the Ohio State football team that has been pledged — and these The Buckeyes are more than capable of winning it all.
It didn’t take long for them to show us what it looked like Wednesday afternoon at the Rose Bowl. Ohio State scored four touchdowns in the first half on drives that lasted a combined two minutes and 58 seconds. The tone was set just three plays after the game’s opening kickoff, with a 45-yard touchdown pass Will Howard to freshman phenom Jeremiah Smith to open scoring. Oregon had barely set foot on pristine grass in this pristine stadium before the Ducks came from a 34-point deficit in a CFP quarterfinal game.
Ohio State fielded the best and most consistent team in the nation all year. The Buckeyes not only avenged October’s one-point loss to the Ducks, but also completely erased the memory of the game and what we thought we knew about both participants. Ohio State is now the undisputed favorite to win the College Football Playoff in just under three weeks.
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Texas should be worried. Just ask Oregon, which was previously undefeated before running into this version of the Buckeyes. Or ask Tennessee, which suffered a first-round postseason beating in Columbus. There seems to be nothing anyone can do when this offense goes this way.
“They clicked tonight and we didn’t,” the Oregon coach Dan Lanning he said as the game mercifully came to an end. “I didn’t prepare our team, which is a great team. When you play a great team like Ohio State, you can’t help but be clicking on all cylinders. And they were. They were clicking on all cylinders.
“We really had no ability to stop them.”
That was clear. Ohio State produced 500 yards of total offense, averaging 18.8 yards per catch and 5.8 yards per carry. Smith had 187 yards and two touchdowns on just seven receptions, earning him Rose Bowl Offensive MVP honors. Afterward, Lanning called the true freshman “NFL ready.” He has two more seasons to play in college.
Meanwhile, Ohio State’s defense sacked the Oregon quarterback and Heisman Trophy finalist Dillon Gabriel. The Ducks have allowed just five total sacks in each of the last two seasons.
“Sometimes it’s not your day. I think that was us today,” Lanning said. “It wasn’t their day against Michigan.”
Ah, yes. Michigan. Ohio State’s stunning 13-10 loss to its hated rival — the Wolverines’ fourth straight for Dan — became even more inexplicable after the loss in the Rose Bowl. How could that team lose to a pretty pedestrian Michigan and then dominate both Tennessee and Oregon like this? Why did Buckeye offensive coordinator Chip Kelly insist on trying to throw the ball between scrimmages to the strength of Michigan’s defense when his alien receivers would surely break the play if they got the ball? Sam Smith was only on target twice in the second half of the game.
We may never get a satisfactory explanation for Ohio State’s baffling game plan and even worse execution that day. But it’s clear, based on what happened afterward, that this roster was capable of much more. It’s not just that Ohio State’s boosters spent $20 million to retain top players from last year’s team and bring in elite complementary pieces from the portal. It’s that there was too much talent at virtually every position on the field for this team to not live up to its potential.
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This version of Ohio State has always been there somewhere, waiting to be unlocked and unleashed. Kelly called an aggressive and wildly confident game. Dan looked looser than he had in years, almost as if he had nothing to lose despite talk of hot seats and poor results in the Buckeyes’ biggest big game. But what was said and done before doesn’t matter anymore. These last two wins — and especially Wednesday’s over a very, very good Oregon team that seemed shell-shocked by nightfall — have done more than enough to cool the place down. These are big wins on big stages against tough, physical opponents with rosters full of NFL talent.
“When things are going well, you have to hug the guys you love the most, and when things aren’t, you have to hug them even tighter,” Day said. “You just hang on and keep rocking. Such is life, and this team is resilient. When you surround yourself with great people with great character, you realize that you are going through tough times.
“At the end of the day, we wanted to win a national championship, and the way we got here was not what we expected. It wasn’t what we planned. But regardless, we had a chance to come back and play Oregon after already playing them earlier in the season, and that’s all that mattered. The guys did a great job staying focused. The staff stuck together … Those guys worked hard to stay together, and now we have an opportunity to play Texas. There’s a lot of football ahead of us.”
And there is no Oregon, a team that won all of its regular season games and the Big Ten championship. The Ducks would make no excuses for their early exit from the CFP, but they faced two unique challenges that certainly didn’t seem fair from the outside.
First, they were the No. 1 overall seed in an unbalanced bracket that required the top four seeds to be conference champions. That allowed Ohio State, a team ranked sixth by the selection committee, to fall all the way to the No. 8 seed. Usually, game 1-8 involves the lowest ranked team in the group. But there were two teams (Boise State and Arizona State) that were ranked lower than the Buckeyes, and the No. 6 and 5 (Penn State and Texas) had to play them in the quarters. Both Penn State and Texas advanced to the semifinals. Through three quarterfinal games, the losing team was the one that received a first-round bye. Lanning said he doesn’t think Oregon is rusty. But it’s worth exploring further in the offseason if that layoff ended up doing more harm than good when it should have been a reward.
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The flip side, of course, is that Ohio State played in the first round and started a postseason run that could end with crimson and gray confetti falling in Atlanta on Jan. 20. Day has repeatedly said he believes a first-round game could be a springboard for something like that, just as we’ve seen teams that make the postseason in the NFL or MLB win wild cards and go on a tear. Maybe there is something to that theory.
Here’s another one: I’d argue that Ohio State wouldn’t be in the position it’s in right now if it weren’t for that horrible loss to Michigan. Day wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s grateful for it, but he acknowledged that the version of the team he coaches today wouldn’t be what he went through.
“I know you are the sum of your experiences,” Day said. “This team achieved great victories this season. He had some tough losses and we learned from them. You have to grow and you have to build yourself and you have to make sure you focus on your strengths and make sure you understand what your weaknesses are. And I think that’s a big part of it.
“At the end of the day, it comes down to our guys. These guys are resilient. We are in a place where you can hear a lot of noise, but they didn’t do that. I’m very, very proud of our staff, and I’m very, very proud of our players. But we are far from that.”
Not with the Buckeyes looking this.
