The 2nd Annual TYOK College Football Spiel

it's the Natty, bro. the NATTY

I know I told you on the 7th (when I sent out my first post of the year) that I was planning to write to you twice a week every week for 52 consecutive weeks. Looks like that’s not happening anymore! I know this is so on brand for me. There’s much to say so I should be back on Friday as previously scheduled.

ANWAYS. It is time for our 2nd Annual College Football Spiel!

A very big deal in the United States. Us Canadians don't really care for it! Nor do we have an equivalent of our own. A fair smattering of games ESPN airs get simulcast on TSN (the Canadian ESPN). Last year I watched a lot of those. Plus the National Championship game, which I wrote about the morning after:

I am not gonna talk about last night’s National Championship game too much. I will say, firstly, that a lot has changed in the last year, both with regards to my consumption of college football (CFB) and the CFB landscape itself.

The first is my discovery that Canadians with cable get the same over-the-air games that Americans get nationally televised on FOX, NBC, and CBS. You fast-forward through enough of those and you learn enough about what’s going on to write a post like this one.

My fave is ESPN’s College GameDay. There are old dads on Twitter who complain about how Pat McAfee ruined the show but I find it wildly entertaining. During the regular season they travel from campus to campus and thousands of students line up at 6AM to see them. You don’t have to be into CFB to enjoy it. Desmond Howard’s contagious laugh! Field goal kicking contests! The consummate pro Rece Davis!

Nick Saban joined the show this season after retiring as head coach of Alabama. He’s the greatest coach in CFB history, but rather than rest on his laurels he is having a blast on national television. When he breaks down plays you pay attention, even if you have no idea what a slant route is. Dude’s got jokes, too:

CFB itself also had a massive year. There were a bunch of teams that switched conferences but we won’t get into that because it’ll confuse you and then you’ll sue me.

More important was playoff expansion. Last year only the 4 best teams at the end of the regular season (as decided by a fancy Selection Committee) made the playoff to compete for a national championship. But this season that number ballooned to 12. Now the top 5 ranked conference champions get in, plus the 7 highest ranked remaining teams. And every week your idea of who those teams would be changed because some of the games and upsets were so bonkers.

There were good teams like Colorado who had eventual Heisman winner Travis Hunter on their team, only to come up short of making the playoff because of a bad stretch of games late in the season. Or elite schools like Alabama losing to small schools like Vanderbilt, which could—and did—shake things up.

yes i’m spoiling it for you idgaf

I initially assumed the Committee would load up with big name schools from the same 2 conferences. But I found their bracket fair and inclusive of smaller schools who had honestly played better than the big ones? Although you could argue those rankings actually didn’t matter, because when the playoff began the bigger schools handedly beat the smaller ones. Penn State beat SMU. Penn State beat Boise State. Notre Dame beat Penn State. Things like that.

Same thing if the favoured school was ranked lower than their opponent, like the #8 Ohio State Buckeyes destroying #1 Oregon.

Ohio State won the Natty, as you can see. Their only losses in the regular season were to #1 Oregon and Michigan. If you know anything about college football, you know Ohio State and Michigan haaaaaaaaate each other. The cyclical nature of CFB meant that even though Michigan won a national championship literally last year, the Buckeyes were still favored by 21 points, the widest point spread for this rivalry since 1978. So when Michigan beat them—in the last week of the regular season, no less—it was a massive deal. They were fighting on the field at the end of the game and everything. It got ugly.

I’m not a huge fan of Buckeyes coach Ryan Day, but whatever hypnotics he pulled off to help his team turn it around… I want what he’s smoking. In the playoff, they destroyed Tennessee at home, then beat Oregon as mentioned, and later the Texas Longhorns in an instant-classic Cotton Bowl.

Going into the playoff I picked Texas to win the Natty and I was a big fan of their quarterback Quinn Ewers, but as the playoff wore on you could see he wasn’t cut from the same cloth as the other QBs in his draft class. In their Peach Bowl quarterfinal against Arizona State, maybe my favourite game of the season, he made a ton of mistakes that led to Arizona State’s insane comeback in the second half which forced the game into double overtime.

When Texas met Ohio State in that Cotton Bowl game (you following?) Ewers was about to throw a dart that would give Texas chance to tie the game with 2 minutes left… except Buckeyes defensive end Jack Sawyer knocked the ball out of his hands and ran for the score. You can and should watch it below:

Ohio State played so well in those playoff games that they were heavy favourites against Notre Dame last night. If you’ve watched Rudy you know Notre Dame is as historic of a program as it gets in CFB. They had the best defence in the country. Plus a killer QB in Riley Leonard, a dynamic receiver in Jeremiah Love, and a coach, Marcus Freeman, who has what I would call gravitas, and what kids these days would call goated aura.

But Ohio State felt inevitable. QB Will Howard was outstanding. Safety Caleb Downs was as good as it gets. And receiver Jeremiah Love hauled in a clutch 57-yard grab late in the 4th. He’s a freshman, by the way! The sky’s the limit for how good both he and the College Football Playoff can become.

See? Just like that, we’re done. I promise I will not ramble about college football for a long time. I still want at least some readership, goddamnit.