Everything — and we mean everything— you really need to know about this weekend’s first-round matchups in the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff. All odds are via DraftKings Sportsbook.
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From the dawn of time, man has dreamed of a College Football Playoff.
Think about how long it has taken to arrive at this moment. If you’ve been around a while, you can probably remember when the very concept of settling the national championship on the field seemed like a faraway fantasy akin to science fiction. We would get flying cars and a cure for baldness before we got a real, honest-to-God bracket in big-time college football.
Consider the various stages of evolution over the course of more than 30 years that brought the sport kicking and screaming to its final destiny. Out of the primordial ooze of the old pell-mell bowl system, there arose the Bowl Coalition (1992-94), which begat the Bowl Alliance (1995-97), which begat the dreaded Bowl Championship Series (1998-2013). Cursed as it was, the BCS was the first effort that successfully merged all competing interests under the same umbrella and subsequently convinced most of the world that it did indeed represent The National Championship in major college football. If that’s all it succeeded in doing, it was still the crucial link from the 20th Century to the 21st, which finally arrived with the first iteration of the 4-team Playoff in 2014.
A decade later, here we are. No polls. No “computer polls.” Not 2 teams. Not 4. Twelve, in all their glory.
So much of the oxygen in college football is consumed these days by complaints about what’s wrong with it, much of which boils down to “changing too fast to keep up.” But the expanded Playoff is the one big idea (possibly the only one) that the sport’s embattled leadership has, at long last, gotten right. It is decades overdue. This, right here, is what it should have been all along.
Beyond the structure of the thing — big thumbs up to auto bids for conference champs and on-campus dates in the first round — the field itself in Year 1 is as compelling as anyone could have asked for. In the absence of an obvious, prohibitive Playoff favorite, there are at least 6 teams that could plausibly win it all without pulling a major upset. That includes Georgia, Texas and Tennessee. The other half of the field includes the likes of Arizona State, Boise State, Indiana and SMU, outfits that have rarely enjoyed a sniff of national relevance and even in their best years could have hardly dreamed of getting a legitimate title shot under any previous arrangement. Seriously, Indiana! The Hoosiers are here in the wake of the best regular season in school history, and from this point on it doesn’t matter one iota what anybody thinks of their schedule. Boise State, whose fans can still cite the exact circumstances of their many BCS snubs, has a bye, and didn’t have to go undefeated to get it.
Is it too good to last? We’ll see. Cynicism is easy: Before the first game has even kicked off, there are already murmurs about tweaking the format, or expanding it further (ugh) to ensure that the 4th- through 6th-best teams in the SEC get the seat at the table the committee denied them this year in favor of SMU. (A no-brainer for anyone not financially or emotionally invested in SEC superiority.) The word “broken” was in circulation immediately following the announcement of the field, for inscrutable reasons that seemed to stem more from a professional reflex for complaining than an attempt to describe anything real. The process is not broken; it hasn’t even had time to be. But that obviously doesn’t mean that certain brokers like SEC commissioner Greg Sankey aren’t determined to fix it in a way that leaves them with a larger slice of the pie.
But all of that is for another day. Right now, we’ve got it: The bona fide bracket this big, unruly sport deserves, with every team that deserves to be in it and none that don’t. We e got access for the underdogs, warm-weather teams consigned to the cold, and, at the end of a grueling month, an undisputed champion. The system works. These are the good times. Enjoy them while you can.
Let the games begin already.
Tennessee at Ohio State (-7.5)
Under normal circumstances, alluding to the hot seat in the context of a coach whose team is a serious contender to win the national championship would feel absurd. But nothing about Ryan Day‘s circumstances at Ohio State are normal. Ohio State coaches are hired to do two things — beat Michigan and win championships — neither of which’s Day’s teams have accomplished in far too long. The Buckeyes haven’t beaten the Wolverines since 2019, Day’s first year in the big chair, and haven’t won a Big Ten title or Playoff game since 2020, in an abbreviated season amid the COVID pandemic. At this point, even acknowledging his impeccable regular-season record against everyone except Michigan reads to OSU fans less like a defense of their coach than an insult to their pride.
As wounded as they were by the 3 straight losses to the Wolverines with the Big Ten crown and CFP implications at stake from 2021-23, this year’s 13-10 flop in Columbus was the anvil that broke the camel’s back. Ohio State was a 19.5-point favorite in that game, at home, over a thoroughly mediocre Michigan outfit in the depths of rebuilding mode. Instead, the Buckeyes’ $20 million roster was embarrassed on its own field by a rival starting a walk-on quarterback who averaged 3.9 yards per attempt with 2 interceptions in victory. Day, who described the rivalry in a pregame interview as “a war,” was caught by cameras during the postgame melee that ensued after Michigan attempted to plant a flag at midfield looking listless and powerless to intervene, reduced to asking a passerby “what happened?”
Every season at Ohio State is a championship-or-bust season, to one extent or another. This year, though, the sentiment feels quite literal: Regardless of whether Day is explicitly coaching for his job, for a large segment of the Buckeyes’ base, anything less than a national title (or at least a deep Playoff run) will go down as another irrefutable mark against his dismal track record in the games that really matter. And whatever his boss says, a first-round exit could very well spell the end.
The QB: Before the season, Nico Iamaleava‘s size, mobility, and 5-star pedigree inspired visions of a dark-horse Heisman campaign. Instead, his role turned out to be more akin to a game manager. Still, within the context of a team that has relied more heavily on the ground game and defense than on his arm, Iamaleava continues to give off the vibes of a simmering talent capable of firing up the bandwagon on any given Saturday.
For one thing, even when he’s struggled to move the sticks, he hasn’t tended to make things worse: He posted the SEC’s 2nd-best interception rate (1.7%), serving up 5 INTs in 303 attempts, and wasn’t picked in either of Tennessee’s defeats. He also closed on a high note, pulling out of a midseason slump in time to deliver a mostly satisfying November. When he looks good, his potential is undeniable. His last time out, he threw 4 touchdown passes in a Playoff-clinching, 36-23 win at Vanderbilt, arguably his best outing of the year. In those tantalizing moments when it all comes together, Iamaleava looks like the complete package and Tennessee looks like a legitimate contender to win it all.
Not for nothing, the Vols’ 2 losses against Arkansas and Georgia were the 2 games in which he spent the most time under duress: The Dawgs and Hogs combined for 30 QB pressures (per PFF) and 9 sacks against a fully intact Tennessee o-line. The weakest links on that front have been the tackles, Lance Heard, John Campbell Jr. and Dayne Davis — Campbell and Davis share reps on the right side — who have all earned the wrong kind of attention at various points this season. They’ll be in the crosshairs Saturday opposite the Buckeyes’ long-tenured edge-rushing tandem, seniors JT Tuimoloau and Jack Sawyer, whose decorated careers to date have yielded a combined 225 pressures, 36 sacks and 6 forced fumbles. Neither Tuimoloau nor Sawyer has emerged as the unstoppable, All-American force Ohio State fans envisioned that they ultimately would; together, they’re still as formidable and well-rounded a pair of bookends as you’ll find on campus. Both are solid Day 2 types in next year’s draft who could plausibly play their way into Day 1 with a postseason surge.
The RB: Tennessee RB Dylan Sampson didn’t have much of a preseason profile and has flown below the radar nationally, like pretty every running back in America not named Ashton Jeanty. He’s not a home-run hitter or a viral sensation. Within the conference, though, his value was obvious, resulting in his coronation as the first running back to win SEC Offensive Player of the Year since Auburn’s Kerryon Johnson in 2017. In the regular season, Sampson accounted for 100+ scrimmage yards in 11 of 12 games, setting single-season school records for total yards (1,626) and rushing touchdowns (22) in the process. Against Power 5 opponents, specifically, that comes out to nearly 35% of the team’s total output on more than 25 touches per game — easily the highest individual share in the SEC, and among the highest in the country. Among Playoff teams, only Jeanty and Arizona State’s Cam Skattebo carried a heavier load.
Sustaining that pace in Columbus will be a feat. Man for man, Ohio State’s veteran front seven is as imposing as any in the country, and statistically Buckeyes are the best run defense Tennessee has faced by a mile. Then again, they’ve hardly been invulnerable, allowing individual 100-yard rushers in both of their losses against Oregon (Jordan James) and Michigan (Kalel Mullings) despite limiting to them to long gains of 25 and 27 yards, respectively. Sampson is imminently capable of adding his name to that list, and in similarly grind-it-out fashion....
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