LOS ANGELES — There are rose petals scattered no matter where you look here, in case you forgot for one second which of the four College Football Playoff quarterfinal games you’re attending.
This is, of course, the Rose Bowl — an iconic event at an iconic venue for what is expected to be a spectacular game. No. 1 Oregon will take on No. 8 Ohio State today in a rematch of the game of the year (so far), which the Ducks won by a single point in front of a raucous crowd at Autzen Stadium back in October. Now, they’ll meet again with a trip to the national semifinals at stake and the San Gabriel Mountains as the backdrop.
In many ways, this game feels more like a heavyweight fight than a quarterfinal. With the amount of talent on the field for Oregon-Ohio State, you could easily confuse it for the national championship, not the game before the game before the national championship game. It’s a little jarring, to be honest. You’ve got the undefeated team that’s been the best and most consistent in the country all year going up against a team that displayed its dazzling full potential its last time out, against Tennessee.
“We have a great opponent across from us, and we’re a great team as well,” Oregon tight end Terrance Ferguson said Monday at Rose Bowl media day. “It has a heavyweight matchup look to it. There’s a lot of good players on the field, a lot of elite talent, a lot of good coaches and two historic programs.”
Ducks wide receiver Tez Johnson said he thinks the upcoming Rose Bowl could be “one of the greatest games that you’ve ever seen in college football ever. You can’t ask for better than this.”
He’s right. And it took a series of unrelated events to get us to this moment. It took Ohio State losing to Michigan, which bumped the Buckeyes out of the Big Ten championship game and down multiple seed lines. It took the CFP’s convoluted seeding rules, which required that conference champions be assigned the top four seeds and pushed the top at-large teams down a few spots, too. So that’s how we got the eighth-seeded Buckeyes taking on the No. 1 overall seed in Pasadena now — not in Atlanta on Jan. 20.
At this point, there’s no reason to complain about such a gift being delivered a few weeks early. This matchup has instant classic potential, especially with the way the Buckeyes are playing. They bounced back from that embarrassing loss to the Wolverines with their most complete and dominant performance of the season, against one of the nation’s best defensive fronts. Ohio State has had to retool its offensive line in recent weeks after two starters suffered season-ending injuries, and it held up well against the Vols. And quarterback Will Howard found his two favorite targets in the passing game — otherworldly freshman Jeremiah Smith and the veteran Emeka Egbuka — early and often. It was a terrific game plan and even better execution.
It was, quite frankly, the version of Ohio State that is more than capable of winning a national title.
“The men now in our program, they knew when the season started that we would be in this situation — so we’ve been preparing all along to be in this situation,” Ohio State coach Ryan Day said. “There were things that have come up this year that we didn’t prepare for, for sure. Things that we did prepare for. But we knew there was going to be ups and downs along the way. And our foundation that we built in the offseason, during the season, during practice, August, September, as time went on, was going to get tested somewhere along the line.
“I gave our guys the analogy of some of those houses that go through storms, and the houses that have the strong foundations when the storm clears are still there. Our team’s still here. We’re still fighting. And ultimately, we have an opportunity to go play a team that right now is ranked the No. 1 team in the country and an opportunity to win a national championship at the end of the road.”
Howard, too, said that he’s particularly proud of this Ohio State team because it hasn’t been easy to get here. He knows that the $20 million roster was always going to put a bullseye on the Buckeyes’ backs. So the lows have felt like the world is ending while the highs brought more relief than joy at times.
“When you come into a season with the type of expectations that we had, you’re never really going to satisfy everyone,” Howard said. “It’s about how you bounce back from those tough times. It’s never going to be perfect. You’re never going to have a perfect game, never going to have a perfect season, very rarely. You’ve got to be able to bounce back from anything that happens and be resilient.
“The thing about this team that I love so much is that every time we get knocked down, we bounce right back. I think we showed that in the last game. I just want to finish this thing the right way for these guys and for this university.”
To do that, Ohio State has to first go through Oregon. For the Ducks to achieve all their big goals, they’ve got to go through the Buckeyes. Future NFL players will square off against future NFL players, iron scraping against iron for a chance to advance. Just the way a Playoff game should be.
