The 12-Team Playoff Saved Ohio State. That’s By Design.
Ryan Day might have been out of a job in any previous college football system. In this one, he’s the championship favorite. What do the semifinal matchups—and the Buckeyes’ path to this point—reveal about the new state of the sport?
It had been a month and two days since Ryan Day was at the nadir of his tenure at Ohio State, frozen in bewilderment amid the pepper spray–flavored chaos following another loss to that school up north. Maybe the worst loss of his six-year stint as head coach, and going back several generations in Columbus.
In any year before this one, that 13-10 defeat to Michigan—a game in which the Buckeyes entered as 19.5-point home favorites before dropping their fourth straight matchup against their hated rival—might have been Day’s last game with Ohio State. The program likely would have considered firing Day, their best players could’ve hit the transfer portal, and the leftovers could have slept-walked through a bowl game with no bearing on the national championship race.
Fast-forward to New Year’s Day, when Ryan Day was sitting at the podium following the Buckeyes’ thorough evisceration of top-ranked Oregon in the Rose Bowl. Not only had he and the Buckeyes lived to fight another day; suddenly, they had established themselves as the favorites to win the national title.
College Football Playoff Coverage
Two rounds into the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff, Day and Ohio State have redeemed that debacle against Michigan with lopsided wins over Tennessee and Oregon. Now, just as they were in the preseason AP poll, they are positioned in the role of front-runners. And whereas Day usually projects the uneasy calm of a hostage video, he seems more relieved to have survived than anything else.
“The way that we got here wasn’t what we expected—it wasn’t what we planned for,” Day said after the Rose Bowl. “But nonetheless, we had an opportunity to come back and play … and that’s the only thing that mattered.”
Indeed. This is a glimpse of the new reality in the 12-team playoff system: Ohio State and three of the other wealthiest programs in the country (Texas, Notre Dame, and Penn State) managed to shrug off their mulligans to advance to college football’s final four. Under all previous systems, from the polls to the Bowl Coalition to the Bowl Alliance to the BCS, none of their regular-season résumés would have been good enough to get them here. Even last year, in the four-team playoff era, only Texas and Penn State would have had a chance to compete in the semifinals according to the committee’s final rankings.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see that TV executives and Big Ten and SEC officials were counting on exactly this happening when they agreed to change the postseason format. The bet was that the programs with five-star athletes and top-end facilities would eventually overwhelm the mid-major interlopers given enough quarters of playing time. Of course, that’s not quite how the shift was billed during its rollout two years ago.
In December 2022, when CFP officials announced that they were going to increase the playoff field from four teams to 12, executive director Bill Hancock pitched the tournament as an expansion of opportunity. “What is it about 12?” Hancock said then. “For me it’s one word: participation. More student-athletes will have a chance to compete for the national championship.”
This suggested that the driving impetus behind expansion, behind the obvious financial windfall, was rewarding the sport’s non-brand-name programs for their regular-season achievement by offering them the chance to face off against bluebloods for college football’s ultimate prize. At least according to the primary talking points of those responsible for the change, the 12-team field was a step toward egalitarianism. And in the first year of the expanded format, Boise State, Arizona State, Indiana, and SMU all got invitations to the party.
But the conversation that followed revealed how the game’s power brokers really think about expansion. ESPN spent most of its live show announcing the CFP participants debating the merits of the committee’s inclusion of Indiana and SMU over Alabama. Nick Saban, a year removed from coaching the Crimson Tide, resumed his advocacy for Alabama, but now as a representative of the cable network that pays $300 million a year for rights to broadcast Bama and its SEC partners. “They should have had to play their way into the playoff by having to win in the ACC championship,” Saban said of SMU, neglecting to mention that Alabama didn’t even earn its way into the SEC championship game. Kirk Herbstreit picked up that argument after the Hoosiers were eliminated by Notre Dame in the playoff’s opening round. “Indiana was outclassed in that game,” Herbstreit said after the 27-17 result. “It was not a team that should’ve been on that field when you consider other teams that could’ve been there.”
In the minds of many in the college football establishment, Indiana’s first 11-win season in 138 years of playing football didn’t measure up to the performance of an Alabama team that lost to 6-6 Vanderbilt and 6-6 Oklahoma. SMU’s most successful season since the Pony Express era didn’t stack up favorably against an Ole Miss résumé that included a loss to a Kentucky team that finished 15th in the SEC standings. What was unsaid but implicit in the Saban and Herbstreit remarks was that the 12-team field was supposed to ensure more opportunities for familiar power players. No matter how big the bracket gets, the same old helmets should appear beneath the bright lights.
Entering the semifinals, that is how things netted out. And it raises a more important question: What does Ohio State’s ticket to the party tell us about the new landscape of the sport?
First, let’s think about the Buckeyes’ path to this point. Staggered by Michigan’s dominant run to the national championship last season, Ohio State leaned on its NIL collectives to raise an estimated $20 million to improve its roster. That money helped lure several important contributors to Columbus, including starting quarterback Will Howard (from Kansas State), defensive back Caleb Downs (from Alabama), and running back Quinshon Judkins (from Ole Miss). Over the summer, Day’s predecessor, Urban Meyer, mused that Ohio State had “one of the most talented rosters in the last decade, maybe ever.”
And what did that unprecedented collection of talent do? It rolled through most of its 12-game schedule but lost two of its three biggest games of the season (at Oregon, vs. Michigan), and barely squeaked by against a .500 Nebraska team at home. Schools like Ohio State play a few games a year against teams that have similar resources; the Buckeyes largely fell flat in those contests. When it mattered most, they didn’t look like the money that was spent on them, and the dispiriting regular-season finale against Michigan confirmed their underachievement.
That gutting loss, after which Day looked on agape as his players traded postgame punches with Michigan, was the sort of defeat that changes history. A comparable college football moment happened 17 years ago, when West Virginia unforgettably coughed up a shot at the national title by losing to rival Pittsburgh (only 4-7!) in the regular-season finale. Two weeks later, head coach Rich Rodriguez left his alma mater for Michigan, and West Virginia hasn’t sniffed a championship ever since. Even today, the 2007 Backyard Brawl is considered one of the darkest days in Morgantown history.
Before the expanded era of the playoffs, a loss of that magnitude couldn’t be atoned for until the subsequent season. This is what college football purists meant when they talked about preserving the sanctity of the regular season: Some losses were too damning, and those were just the breaks for a team with championship aspirations. There was no way for Oklahoma State to bounce back from dropping a gimme against Iowa State in 2011. No way for Georgia to recover from falling five yards short against Alabama in 2012. No way for 2013 Bama to soften the blow of the Kick-Six, and no way for 2018 Michigan—in position to secure its first-ever CFP berth—to spin things forward after losing a seventh straight matchup to … Ohio State.
The mood was similarly funereal in Columbus last month, and Day seemed to understand that. “This is not easy to accept, and I obviously have to take the ownership,” he said after the game. In that moment, it wasn’t hard to imagine Day getting run out of town. This was an unforgivable loss, one that revealed a shaky foundation despite the program’s star-studded cast of blue-chippers.
Alas, unlike almost every team that has preceded them, two-loss Ohio State still has the opportunity to turn that failure into a footnote. And they’re not alone: If any team other than Notre Dame wins it all, college football will have its third two-loss national champion ever. The only two members of that club right now are 2007 LSU, which benefited from the year of the upset, and 1960 Minnesota, which went 8-2 under head coach Murray Warmath.
Texas lost two games this season to Georgia, the only team it faced that finished in the top 10 of the committee’s rankings. Penn State dropped games to Ohio State and Oregon, the only top-15 opponents it faced. And while Notre Dame has only one loss, that loss is the worst nonconference loss that any title-contending team has had in the modern era; MAC sixth-place finisher Northern Illinois beat the Irish 16-14 in Week 2. You think that would have happened to 2019 LSU? Hell, even 2007 LSU?
But that’s the motley bunch of headliners left standing as the semifinals kick off Thursday. And if Ohio State does what’s expected as the favorite and wins two more games, it’s fair to say its legacy as a champion will differ from that of its illustrious predecessors. The Buckeyes didn’t beat their biggest rival, didn’t win the Big Ten, and yet could still end the season triumphant.
The 12-team tournament will have ultimately served its stated purpose: crown the event’s best team as a national champion. But that’s different from crowning the season’s best team as a national champion. And that small shift represents a stark departure from how the sport has operated in the past.
Any of the four semifinalists that emerge as the playoff’s winner will have earned it. But that won’t mean it will live on in fans’ memories in the same way as 2001 Miami, 2004 USC, 2022 Georgia, or 2023 Michigan. College football fans will soon learn to think of their champions in the same way that NFL devotees do the 2020 Tampa Bay Buccaneers or the 2021 Los Angeles Rams. They’re the champs, right? Who cares if they didn’t always play that way?
In the end, the 12-team playoff system will have done for Ohio State—and Texas, and Penn State, and Notre Dame—what $20 million couldn’t: clean up their mess.
Hail, eventually, to the victors.
