' ' Cinema Romantico: The Last College Football Post of the Season

Saturday, January 25, 2025

The Last College Football Post of the Season


If it was a fun college football season, it was also a long one, not least because it essentially tacked on a whole extra month for the first go-round of the 12-team playoff which kicked off December 20th and ended January 20th. It didn’t feel anti-climactic, exactly, but it also felt less special because unlike New Year’s Days of yore, college football didn’t have last Monday all to itself. Sour grapes of one traditionalist aside, I’m sure it was plenty special to the Ohio State Buckeyes who won the inaugural expanded hootenanny and, by extension, college football’s national championship even after their talent-laden roster flirted with apathy the whole regular season. In any other year, the Buckeyes would have been out of the running, if not after their dramatic one-point defeat to Oregon in October than certainly after their epic spitting the bit against arch-rival Michigan in late November, a 13-10 choke job and their fourth straight loss to the hated team from up north that seemed to leave them mentally finished. Yet, in this new world of an NCAA Football Tournament (Winter Wildness?), where March bracketology buzzwords with gross white-collar connotations like resume become paramount, Ohio State’s body of work (bleh) was still good enough to gain entry and engendered the deepest, drollest of ironies. That is, they were in the place 121 other teams wished they were, that coaches would be placed on the hot seat for not getting to, and yet, because of that loss to Michigan, here was Buckeye coach Ryan Day in the playoff but on the hot seat himself with nothing less than a national championship or bust mandate. 

Whether the Michigan game finally set them free, or just teed them off, the Buckeyes finally met their massive potential in the playoff by obliterating Tennessee in round one and then getting revenge by steamrolling Oregon in a Rose Bowl quarterfinal. And in the semifinal against Texas, defensive lineman Jack Sawyer steamrolled Longhorn quarterback Quinn Ewers on one electrifying, insane scoop and score play that turned a 21-14 game Texas on the verge of tying into a 28-14 win, the kind of play that leaves you laughing from sheer bewildered delight as it’s happening. In the championship against fellow Midwesterners Notre Dame, meanwhile, Ohio State appropriately demonstrated each half of its dual identity, roaring out to a 31-7 lead so emphatically it looked over early before getting stuck in the mud as the Fighting Irish clawed back to within 31-23. Fittingly, the Buckeyes sealed it by ignoring Day’s misguided tendency to cosplay Woody Hayes and act tough, as he did against Michigan, and air it out, a deep ball to stud freshman receiver Jeremiah Smith in one-on-one coverage that did not score a touchdown but earned a first down to set up a field goal to seal victory. The play was appropriately symbolic, suggesting they could essentially do whatever they wanted so long as they remembered they could essentially do whatever they wanted and not so on edge as to suddenly forget. 

Frankly, we could not have a better case study for the first NCAA Football Tournament victor than this Ohio State team. In this brave new world of so-called Name, Image, and Likeness, in which players can profit from their personal brand, meaning schools can pay them, few disbursed more NIL funds than the Buckeyes, a reported $20 million to sculpt the eventual champs. The expanded playoff might provide more access for more non-bluebloods, like Arizona State and Boise State, but perhaps it also ensures that in the end, the richest cream will just rise to the top. More than that, though, Ohio State’s ninth national championship will always be inseparable from its loss to Michigan. That is not to say their title comes with an asterisk; it is not hollow or illegitimate. But it does bear a certain spiritual ball and chain. Jack Sawyer said it in so many words: “I won’t ever get over that loss.” Does the championship outweigh it? That is for each player and coach to decide, and it probably does, or they will probably say it does, though deep down in places they don’t talk about at parties I also suspect that they will always wonder if that’s true. And if that means the tension between the game’s regional roots and national ambitions has not yet tilted entirely toward the latter, it’s victory enough.

Time will tell if this national title is victory enough for the ultra-successful yet much-maligned Ryan Day. Though he has not always made things easy on himself, Day has been in some cases been treated truly callously and is deserving of a victory lap of the whole state in the manner of a 19th-century Christmas, demanding to be let into homes flying OSU flags and requesting a celebratory Rhinegeist Truth IPA in each one. Even so, he will probably be the first to tell you that “(n)ext year it’ll all be forgotten,” to quote the immortal “Mean” Joe Greene after the Pittsburgh Steelers won their fourth Super Bowl in six years to cap the Steel Curtain dynasty. “It’ll be, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ A vicious, vicious cycle.” 

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