In the College Football Playoff era, if you don’t win the game everybody circled before the season, there is no reason to feel left out when the committee overlooks you on the day the tickets were handed out to the Dance.
This is true even if you were king a year ago.
The Ohio State Buckeyes entered the 2015 season as the heavy favorite to repeat as national champions. Analysts across the country made it clear that the group that just won a national championship was the most talented program in the country.
The Buckeyes’ playoff run — defeating three straight Heisman finalists with their third string quarterback — created a narrative from January through September which reminded college football fans on a daily basis that you would see them in the CFP semifinals in 2015.
Instead, it’s an afternoon matchup on New Year’s Day in the 2016 Fiesta Bowl with Notre Dame.
It’s a game that, to most of Buckeye Nation, feels like a letdown. For many Ohio State fans, it is also the product of a failure by the playoff committee to properly rank OSU. It highlights the silly decision making of Rose Bowl officials, and it questions whether or not the current playoff framework is the best for the game Buckeye fans love.
Or is it the program they love?
Look, this is what we all love about the sport of college football. Every week isn’t a session in which you put teams on paper to see which one moves on. The Buckeyes had the keys to the championship from the start of the season.
When you don’t play even close to the level of expectation until the end of the season, and total the rental car against Michigan State the week before, you have to pay the bill. Once the crash goes on your record, other rental companies have the right to pass over you.
No tape of your perfect driving the week before is going to change that.
The Buckeyes faced a near-impossible task heading into the beginning of the season and damn near found a way to get back into the College Football Playoff. The struggles between Cardale Jones and the coaching staff would have killed most teams’ hopes by the end of the third week of the season.
Questionable offensive playcalling and execution would have turned into a couple of losses in the final minutes of a game, as would not having someone in the program who can make a field goal with any consistency.
For most programs, the eternal combustion that took place after the Michigan State loss would have set a coaching staff back for weeks. It might have caused that same staff to lose its team for good.
It was different for Ohio State.
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Ezekiel Elliott’s frustration slammed into the chests of defenders who tried to stop him at Michigan Stadium.
The Buckeyes might not have met the expectations of college football fans. They didn’t play at a high level until the final game of the year against their bitter rival in that state to the north.
In the playoff era, any fan has a right to feel that his or her favorite team didn’t meet expectations if it wasn’t selected as one of the four to play for a national championship. That is what the sport is built around.
Like professional football, the season has now been turned into a trivial period that gives the final product time to develop. Football isn’t a game that’s played on paper, but its season is now just the resume that gets your foot in the door.
The Buckeyes were not even close to being a final candidate.
So many times, the best qualified miss out on their opportunity. Ohio State was supposed to dominate the spotlight, and when the Buckeyes did this season, it was for the wrong reason. They had all the tools to own the College Football Playoff and any obstacle that was put in front of them.
The only ones to blame for tripping up are themselves.
