There are so many ways to crack open and compare the College Football Playoff semifinals. You’ll get all the angles in due time over the course of the next two and a half weeks.
Today, consider one of the foremost similarities between the Orange Bowl and the Cotton Bowl: the presence of revenge as a motivating factor for the lower-seeded team, even though it works in different ways for the parties involved. What’s particularly notable is that the moment being avenged by each of the lower seeds occurred in the same stadium.
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For Michigan State, the memory of a 49-7 wipeout loss at the hands of Alabama in the 2011 Capital One Bowl won’t necessarily affect the players on the 2015 MSU roster. However, it’s certainly a moment Mark Dantonio internalized and — much more importantly — learned from.
Consider this about Saban 49, Dantonio 7: Michigan State hasn’t lost a bowl game since that ugly afternoon in Orlando. The 2011 Spartans won the Outback Bowl against Georgia; pulled off a miraculous comeback against TCU in the 2012 Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl; and have continued to find “Sparty Devil Magic” as the Kansas City Royals of college football in subsequent seasons, during regular seasons and bowl seasons alike.
Michigan State’s players won’t think about revenge heading into the Cotton Bowl. However, it’s clear that Mark Dantonio has learned from the 2011 Capital One Bowl on so many levels. This game provides a forum and opportunity in which to show that he’s learned how to beat Nick Saban. If he can complete the circle first drawn five years ago in Orlando, Dantonio will symbolically and tangibly show that his program has fully overcome “49-7.”
He’ll also have a chance to play for the national championship, marking Michigan State’s first true “national championship game” since the infamous 10-10 tie with Notre Dame in 1966.
Dantonio versus Saban: It’s the best coaching matchup of the bowls, but the revenge angle — with Michigan State’s current coach trying to bounce back from one of his worst losses, suffered at the hands of a former MSU coach — richly flavors that matchup to an even greater extent.
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For Oklahoma, revenge is a lot more recent and a lot more personal as the playoff semifinals approach.
The Sooners’ coaching staff will certainly feel the need to wipe away an ugly memory — much as Mark Dantonio wants to permanently eradicate the sting of “49-7” — but Oklahoma’s players are very much involved in the effort to regain their football dignity. That dignity was lost inside the same Citrus Bowl stadium where Michigan State got pulverized by the Tide a few years earlier.
(No smart alecks here: Sure, the Citrus Bowl was in fact renovated, so it wasn’t the exact same physical structure, but it wasn’t torn down. The playing surface was changed, but the site and stadium remain essentially the same. Back to our regularly scheduled program.)
Whereas Michigan State doesn’t have players who were around on January 1, 2011, the current Oklahoma roster has plenty of players who personally participated in — and felt the full weight of — a 40-6 loss to Clemson in the Russell Athletic Bowl on December 29, 2014.
What makes OU’s burning desire for revenge that much more acute — and what makes this upcoming Orange Bowl so fresh — is that Deshaun Watson did not play in the Russell Athletic Bowl. Clemson dominated the Sooners with Cole Stoudt at quarterback — the gulf in performance, preparation, energy, wakefulness, and every other fundamental virtue of competition was as wide as the Grand Canyon.
Clemson and Dabo Swinney could not have impressed neutral observers any more, on a night when their star quarterback was hurt. Oklahoma could not have embarrassed itself to any greater extent, precisely because its opponent lacked its best offensive player.
That game marked the culmination of yet another season in which Oklahoma lacked a nasty and imposing presence on its defensive line. The idea that the Sooners had become both soft and stale was cemented — at least in the present moment — by “40-6,” OU’s equivalent to “49-7” for Mark Dantonio in East Lansing.
Oklahoma has refuted its recent history and halted that narrative of timidity and lifelessness with this spectacular post-Texas resurgence in 2015. Beating Clemson, and silencing the ghosts of “40-6”, would offer the truest and most complete affirmation of the idea that Oklahoma football is back where it ought to be.
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Mark Dantonio’s desire to flip the script.
Oklahoma’s attempt to erase a very painful memory.
Both revenge attempts flow from a blowout loss inside the Citrus Bowl stadium.
We’ll see which team — if any — is able to correct the course of history in the semifinals of the College Football Playoff.
