Everything — and we mean everything— you really need to know about the quarterfinal matchups in the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff.
(Betting lines via FanDuel Sportsbook.)
Fiesta Bowl: Penn State (-11.5) vs. Boise State
It’s been awhile, but I can’t quite get my head around Boise State’s arrival on this stage without thinking about the great Chris Petersen-era Boise teams of the late aughts, outfits that regularly made a mockery of the postseason system at the time. From 2006-11, the Broncos pulled off 3 undefeated regular seasons and 5 top-10 finishes in the BCS standings without so much as sniffing a title shot, their second-class status sealed before they’d even played a down.
Those teams backed it up at every opportunity, too, boasting annual wins over power-conference competition. Much has been made of the 2011 Alabama-LSU rematch in the title game as the death knell for the BCS, but by that point, I always felt like it was half-dead already from embarrassment that the Boises of the world never stood a chance.
Well, now they do.
The ’24 Broncos haven’t built up quite as much national cred as the best of the Petersen-era teams, partly because they had little to begin with coming off a tumultuous, 8-6 finish in 2023, and partly because they didn’t notch a marquee win — if anything, they earned more respect from their marquee loss, a 37-34 decision at Oregon decided on a walk-off field goal back in Week 2. Combine that with the 12-game winning streak that followed, a conference championship, and the Heisman runner-up (Ashton Jeanty), and you have a team so comfortably in the field that it qualified for a first-round bye with room to spare.
Fifteen years late, sure. But better late than never.
Ashton Jeanty is Him: Need I go on? Heisman runner-up, unanimous All-American, viral highlight machine, future first-rounder, all-purpose dynamo. Jeanty is not just the FBS rushing leader; he’s ahead of the next guy on the list by more than 800 yards. He’s within striking distance of Barry Sanders’ single-season rushing record, which speaks for itself even without all the caveats and asterisks that accompany that distinction.
Jeanty’s raw production is absurd in any era, but especially in one that seems to have collectively decided at some point that the concept of the workhorse running back was due for the scrapheap. He’s carried a full load from start to finish and put up numbers against everybody, including Oregon, where he accounted for 200 yards and 3 TDs in the Broncos’ last-second loss in Week 2. That was an average night for him.
On that note, if there’s any aspect of Jeanty’s game at this point that could possibly be called underrated, it’s just how much of his output he creates himself. Per PFF, he forced more missed tackles (135) and generated more yards after contact (1,889) this season than any other player in the PFF database, dating to 2014.
Like, a lot more, on both counts. No other college back in the past decade is even within sniffing distance of those numbers. Nearly 1,900 yards after contact! Just for some context, in his Heisman-winning season in 2015, Derrick Freakin’ Henry was credited with an amazing 1,339 yards after contact, easily the best in the country that year and among the best of the decade — and still more than 500 yards fewer than Jeanty has generated so far in 2024, on 30 more carries. I’ve used up my allotment of italics for this bullet point, let’s move on.
Alas, challenges await: Anyway, as you can see from the tale of the tape (and probably could have guessed without it), Penn State is the stiffest defense Jeanty has faced this year by some distance, both according to the conventional stats and advanced metrics like EPA and Success Rate. Not that the Nittany Lions are impervious to the run: Even including negative yardage on sacks, they’ve taken their lumps against USC (189 yards on 7.9 per carry), Ohio State (176 on 4.4 per carry), and Oregon (183 on 4.3 ypc in the Big Ten Championship Game). Not coincidentally, those games resulted in 2 losses and a razor-thin escape in overtime.
Still, despite the very real threat Jeanty poses at all times, Penn State’s across-the-board talent edge everywhere else should allow the Lions to sell out to stop the main character without worrying too much about the surrounding cast. Boise’s wideouts are unlikely to shake Penn State’s DBs downfield, and diminutive Boise QB Maddux Madsen should feel Abdul Carter‘s heat-seeking presence off the edge every time he drops back. Other defenses have attempted to throw the kitchen sink at Jeanty and dare Madsen to beat them with his arm, with dismal results. (See: San Diego State.) But Penn State might be the first defense the Broncos have seen with the dudes to pull it off.
Who can stop Tyler Warren? Boise, on the other hand, should be very concerned about its marginal secondary attempting to match up with the Nittany Lions’ receivers: Tight end Tyler Warren is a perennial matchup problem against any college defense, and the Lions’ top 3 wideouts (Harrison Wallace III, Omari Evans and Liam Clifford) averaged a combined 16.7 yards per catch between them. They don’t have to touch the ball a lot to do their fair share of damage. It’s one thing to give up a lot of passing yards when most of your opponents spend most of their time in comeback mode, as Boise’s opponents often did; it’s another to struggle in the efficiency stats, like yards per attempt, EPA and passer rating, which the Broncos often did, ranking in the bottom half nationally in all of the above. They allowed 28 receptions of 30+ yards, more than all but 3 teams in the country.
On the other hand, they were much more successful getting after opposing quarterbacks, ranking No. 2 nationally in sacks behind only Ole Miss. Drew Allar was among the better protected passers in the Big Ten in the regular season, but is coming off a 3-sack outing against SMU in the first round; the Mustangs didn’t have to sell out to get home, either, blitzing on just 5 of Allar’s 27 drop-backs, per PFF. Coincidentally or not, that game yielded his worst passer rating of the season (107.6) on a much sloppier afternoon for Penn State’s offense than the 38-10 final score implied. Replicating that pressure, and ideally forcing a takeaway or two in the process, is Boise’s best shot at survival.
Bottom line: Jeanty is going to get his one or another, but he has a herculean task in front of him if Madsen’s unable to loosen up Penn State’s secondary. Madsen is resourceful and accurate when he’s able to plant his feet and throw on time; under steady pressure, he’s a candidate to reprise the multi-turnover meltdown by SMU’s Kevin Jennings in the face of a relentless Nittany Lion pass rush in the first round. Early success is critical to keep Jeanty viable and the entire playbook open. If the game unfolds for the Broncos in the early going the way it did for the Mustangs, this one has the potential to get just as ugly.– – –
Penn State 34 | • Boise State 24
• • •
Rose Bowl: Ohio State (-2.5) vs. Oregon
Pretty much from the moment the Playoff race began to come into focus, the dominant theme was the fact that there is no dominant team. By midseason, it was already obvious that none of the usual suspects could be counted on to be their best selves from one week to the next. By November, nearly all of the teams still boasting unblemished records entering the home stretch (Miami, BYU, Indiana, Army) looked less like contenders than interlopers who ain’t played nobody, which they all subsequently turned out to be.
Over the final month of the regular season, at least 2 teams ranked in the CFP committee’s weekly top 10 lost on 4 consecutive Saturdays, with 6 of those defeats coming at the hands of unranked opponents. The national championship picture, according to everyone in the business of attempting to make sense of the national championship picture, was wide open.
Meanwhile, there was Oregon, undefeated and entrenched at the top of the polls, coasting alone above the chaos.
In any other season, 2024 would have have been readily acknowledged by now as the Year of the Duck. While not quite a “usual suspect” in the Playoff era, Oregon is hardly an interloper, either: The Ducks opened the year ranked 3rd in the preseason AP poll and 6th according to 247Sports’ Team Talent Composite, thanks largely to their efforts in the portal under third-year head coach Dan Lanning. In lieu of dominance, they were the only team in America that managed week-in, week-out consistency from start to finish, going 3-0 against fellow Playoff teams (Boise State, Ohio State and Penn State) by a combined margin of 12 points; the rest of their schedule they dispatched by an average of more than 3 touchdowns per game, only 1 of which — a 16-13 decision at Wisconsin in mid-November — was decided by single digits. Under the BCS, that résumé would have ushered them directly to the championship game. Under the 4-team CFP, it would have cemented them as solid favorites to advance out of the semis, at least.
Now? Welcome to the new world, one where the undisputed No. 1 team in the country can find itself cast as a narrow underdog in the Round of 8 against a team it has already beat. That’s how good Ohio State looked in its first-round beatdown of Tennessee, which was all the betting public (if not the locals) needed to see to move on from the Buckeyes’ all-too-familiar flop against Michigan to end the regular season. As it turns out, that loss did not condemn Ryan Day to the firing squad, and only delayed the thwarted rematch against Oregon in the Big Ten title game by a few weeks. Obviously, the stakes in Pasadena are much more dramatic than they would have been in Indianapolis.
All of which is to say that, a month from now, it’s still possible that we’ll look back and concede it was Oregon all ...
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