PASADENA, Calif. — A few Ohio State players crouched behind Ryan Day before lifting a white bucket of red roses and dumping the petals on their coach’s head. As he realized what was happening, Day grinned, the smile stretching all the way up to his eyes.
Day was, quite literally, stopping to smell the roses after the Buckeyes’ 41-21 win over No. 1 Oregon here in the College Football Playoff quarterfinal round. They’ll play Texas next in the Cotton Bowl with a trip to the national championship game on the line.
This is what we were waiting for. This is the Ohio State football team that was promised — and these Buckeyes are more than capable of winning it all.
It didn’t take long for them to show us what that looked like on Wednesday afternoon at the Rose Bowl. Ohio State scored four touchdowns in the first half on drives that combined for a total of two minutes, 58 seconds. The tone was set just three plays after the game’s opening kickoff, with a 45-yard touchdown pass from Will Howard to freshman phenom Jeremiah Smith to open the scoring. Oregon had barely stepped onto the pristine grass at this pristine stadium before the Ducks found themselves trailing by 34 points in a CFP quarterfinal game.
Ohio State manhandled the team that had been the best and most consistent in the nation all year long. The Buckeyes not only avenged a one-point October loss to the Ducks, but they also completely obliterated the memory of the game and what we thought we knew about both of its participants. Ohio State is now the undeniable favorite to win the College Football Playoff in little less than three weeks’ time.
Texas should be worried. Ask Oregon, which was previously unbeaten before running into this version of the Buckeyes. Or ask Tennessee, which suffered the first round of postseason bludgeoning back in Columbus. There appears to be nothing anyone can do once this offense gets going this way.
“They clicked tonight, and we didn’t,” Oregon coach Dan Lanning said when the game had mercifully reached its end. “I didn’t get our team prepared, and that’s a great team. When you play a great team like Ohio State, you can’t not be clicking on all cylinders. And they were. They were clicking on all cylinders.
“We really didn’t have the ability to stop them.”
That much was clear. Ohio State racked up 500 total yards of offense, averaging 18.8 yards per catch and 5.8 yards per carry. Smith tallied 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’s still got two seasons of college ball to play.
Meanwhile, the Ohio State defense sacked Oregon quarterback and Heisman Trophy finalist Dillon Gabriel. The Ducks had only allowed five total sacks in each of the past 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 fourth straight such loss to the Wolverines for Day — became even more inexplicable after the rout at the Rose Bowl. How could that team lose to a rather pedestrian Michigan and then dominate both Tennessee and Oregon like this? Why did Buckeye offensive coordinator Chip Kelly insist on attempting to run the ball between the tackles into the strength of Michigan’s defense when its otherworldly receivers would surely have broken open the game if they’d gotten the ball? Smith himself was only targeted twice in the second half of the game.
We may never get a satisfactory explanation for the confounding Ohio State game plan and even poorer execution that day. But it’s clear, based on what happened afterward, that this roster was capable of so much more. It’s not just that Ohio State boosters spent $20 million to retain the best players from last year’s team and bring in elite complementary pieces from the portal. It’s that there was too much talent at basically every single position on the field for this team to fail to live up to its potential.
This version of Ohio State was always there somewhere, waiting to be unlocked and unleashed. Kelly called an aggressive and wildly confident game. Day seemed looser than he had in ages, almost as if he had nothing to lose despite hot seat talk and a poor track record in the biggest of the Buckeyes’ big games. But what was said and done previously no longer matters. These last two wins — and particularly Wednesday’s over a very, very good Oregon team that appeared shellshocked by nightfall — have done more than enough to cool that seat. These are big wins on big stages against tough, physical opponents with rosters filled with NFL talent.
“When things are going good, you’ve got to hug the guys you love the most, and when things aren’t, you’ve got to hug them even harder,” Day said. “You just hang in there and you keep swinging. That’s life, and this team is resilient. When you surround yourself with great people with great character, you find yourself working through difficult times.
“At the end of the day, we wanted to win a national championship, and the way that we got here wasn’t what we expected. It wasn’t what we planned for. But nonetheless, we had an opportunity to come back and play Oregon after we had already played them early in the season, and that’s the only thing that mattered. The guys have been doing a great job staying focused. The staff has stuck together… Those guys have worked hard to stay together, and now we’ve got an opportunity to go play Texas. There’s a lot of football ahead of us.”
And there isn’t for Oregon, a team that had won all of its regular-season games and the Big Ten championship to boot. The Ducks wouldn’t make excuses for their early CFP exit, but they did face two unique challenges that certainly didn’t seem fair from the outside looking in.
First, they were the No. 1 overall seed in an unbalanced bracket that required that the top-four seeds 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. Typically, a 1-8 game features the lowest-ranked team in the bracket. But there were two teams (Boise State and Arizona State) that were ranked lower than the Buckeyes, and seeds No. 6 and 5 (Penn State and Texas) got to play them in the quarters. And Penn State and Texas both advanced to the semifinals. Through three quarterfinal games, the losing team has been the one that received a first-round bye. Lanning said he didn’t think Oregon was rusty. But it’s worth further exploration in the offseason, if that layoff ended up hurting more than it helped when it was supposed to be a reward.
The flip side, of course, is that Ohio State played in the first round and jumpstarted a postseason run that may end with scarlet and gray confetti falling in Atlanta on Jan. 20. Day has said repeatedly that he believed a first-round game could be a springboard to something like that, just the way we’ve seen teams that squeak into the postseason in the NFL or MLB win wild-card games and go on a tear. Perhaps there’s something to that theory.
Here’s another: I’d argue that Ohio State would not be in the position it’s in right now were it not for that horrendous 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 couldn’t be that without going through what it did.
“I know that you’re a sum of your experiences,” Day said. “This team has had great wins this season. It’s had some tough losses, and we have learned from those. You’ve got to grow and you’ve got to build and you’ve got to make sure you’re focusing on your strengths and making sure that you understand what your weaknesses are. And I think that’s a big part of it.
“Ultimately, it comes down to our guys. These guys are resilient. We’re at 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’re far from done.”
Not with the Buckeyes looking like this.
