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We’ve talked in recent weeks about how well teams are playing and how well they could be playing. That’s been the crux of a lot of our playoff analysis. We looked at 247’s talent composite and we looked at our model’s Movelor power ratings, and entering the playoff, we basically broke it down as follows:
- Oregon, Penn State, Notre Dame, and Tennessee: Playing well, probably couldn’t play better.
- Georgia, Texas, Ohio State, and Clemson: Not playing that well, could play much better.
- Boise State, Arizona State, Indiana, SMU: Playing well for them, probably couldn’t play better.
Eight of the teams reached the playoff by playing to their ceiling. Four of them reached it despite not playing to their ceiling. Of the four who hadn’t played to their ceiling, Clemson failed to improve its play, Texas has failed to improve its play so far, Ohio State vastly improved its play, and the jury’s out on Georgia until later today, if not next week. Let’s talk about Texas and Ohio State.
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Ask a Texas fan, and they’ll tell you these Longhorns have been maddening to watch. After the Michigan game, the Longhorns looked like the best football team in the country, and after Oklahoma, it looked that way again. The offense looked professional. The defense looked professional. Quinn Ewers was healthy enough to scramble a little. There were no red flags.
Since that performance in Dallas, red flags have piled up. Aside from the beatdown of Florida, there hasn’t been a single game where Texas played well on both sides of the ball. Even against Florida, the Longhorns beat a Gator team led by Aidan Warner, not DJ Lagway or Graham Mertz.
Against Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Texas A&M, and Clemson, the offense underwhelmed. Against Vanderbilt and Clemson, the defense was frustrating. In the SEC Championship and again yesterday against ASU, there were issues on both sides of the ball. Ewers looks mostly healthy, but he’s not entirely there. Is his oblique injury amplifying preexisting issues with arm strength? The offensive line struggled yesterday in the second half. Is Kelvin Banks ok? What’s going on with Malik Muhammad in coverage? What will Ohio State’s receivers do to exploit that?
Texas came out of the locker room yesterday and showed how much faster they were than Arizona State. The rest of the game, Arizona State managed to render that moot. Part of this was heroic efforts from Cam Skattebo. Part of this was a very good game from Sam Leavitt, who should have been overmatched. Part of this was good coverage and good tackling by a relatively unheralded Sun Devil defense. But Leavitt wasn’t the only part of Arizona State who should have been overmatched yesterday. You can give ASU credit for playing their guts out and for outperforming all reasonable expectations all year, but you can also acknowledge that Texas should be much better than the Texas we keep seeing.
Ask a Texas fan, and they’ll tell you these Longhorns have been maddening to watch. They’ll struggle, though, to say exactly what’s going wrong. Are they playing to their level of competition? Are they trying to pace themselves for a 17-game season? Is Ewers the problem? Is Bert Auburn?
There are two plausible explanations for what we keep seeing from Steve Sarkisian’s team.
The first is that Texas hasn’t put it all together yet but still can, that they aren’t playing up to their talent level but they’re capable of getting there.
The second is that Texas hasn’t put it all together yet and won’t, either because of specific nagging injuries lowering their ceiling or because, like so many talented Texas teams before them (and like iconically underachieving Texas A&M under Jimbo Fisher), they’re simply not that good.
If it’s this last explanation—that Texas just isn’t a great football team—it gets more complicated when you drill in. Is it playcalling? Position coaching? Strength and conditioning? Is it makeup at the player level? Is it the issue of focus which became such a narrative in Texas circles during the Tom Herman era? If Texas comes out next week at Jerry World and plays like they’ve played these last three months, we’ll have to explore a little deeper, especially because we’ve really thought Sark ironed out the focus challenge. At a high level, though, what Texas fans are seeing might not be able to be fixed in one game. Texas just might not be that good.
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If you’re a Texas fan reading this, take heart and also brace yourself. Because when it comes to Ohio State, we could have said things three weeks ago much like what we just said about Texas. Now, Ohio State is head and shoulders playing like the best team in the country. It really can turn on a dime.
Oregon was probably not as good as we’d expect a 13–0 Power Two team to be. Their toughest game came against Ohio State, but it was in Eugene, and they still probably should have lost. (Will Howard and Ryan Day saved them.) Beyond that, there was a neutral-site game against a Penn State team I don’t think anyone should seriously think will win this national championship, and then…the trip to Ann Arbor? Apologies to Boise State, but going by where teams stand right now, that was Oregon’s third-toughest game of 2024.
Still, Oregon was a very good football team. They were in that second tier of talent, there with Clemson behind the Alabama/Georgia/Ohio State/Texas quartet. They handled business every single game this year, and as we got at on Tuesday, only against Boise State and Wisconsin were they ever in potentially season-altering trouble. They had the most reliable quarterback in the country. They had a good coach, one with a respectable record in big games. Ohio State crushed them.
So much was made of Ohio State last offseason. The “best team money can buy.” What did we see yesterday? Yes. That might have been the best team money can buy. This isn’t to say it’s all NIL and the transfer portal, but that’s a part of it. They are loaded with five-stars, and they have them in every shape you can find. There’s Jack Sawyer, a top-ten recruit who’s now a senior. There’s Caleb Downs, the top transfer in last year’s portal. There’s Jeremiah Smith, the top high school recruit in the country last year and an early frontrunner for both next year’s and 2026’s Heisman. The only potential weakness is Will Howard, and while inconsistency’s a fair critique, the man did his job yesterday and did his job against Tennessee. When he’s good, he’s clinically effective, and Ohio State has enough talent to cover for him when he’s giving the ball away and getting in his own head.
I wish I could give you more right now about Ohio State, but there isn’t much more to say. What we saw yesterday is what happens when a top-talent team plays to its ceiling. I don’t know that we’ve seen that in college football since Georgia massacred TCU.
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Speaking of Georgia, there was the horrific terror attack in New Orleans yesterday in the very early hours of New Year’s Day. Obviously, our prayers are with the victims and with those who mourn, and there are dozens of things more important than a football game when it comes to that attack. To awkwardly segue into how it impacts the Sugar Bowl, which is now today, a few thoughts:
The average Notre Dame player is smarter than the average Georgia player, and also more culturally aware. This isn’t some shot at Georgia. Georgia’s a solid school. But Notre Dame’s admissions office says no to more football recruits than Georgia’s. That’s factual. How does this impact the game? To use the old “You have to either be really smart or really dumb to be good at sports” line, I’d imagine Georgia’s got more guys capable of completely blocking out the noise, and that Notre Dame’s probably more aware of the noise. Once the noise does get in, Notre Dame’s probably better equipped to process what’s happening. From a focus standpoint, I think it’s possible a few Georgia players could be hit pretty hard by this internally, while for Notre Dame, it’s more likely to sand down the edge a bit across the board.
I don’t know that Kirby Smart’s a great game-planner. He has multiple national championships, but he also has an Alabama-sized block in his head the size of Michigan’s for Ryan Day. The genius of Kirby Smart has been his capacity to harness Georgia’s perennial talent advantage without getting in the way. So far this year, it hasn’t worked out that well, and yet they still won the SEC. I say all this to say: I don’t think we should look at “the game got moved back 19 hours” and automatically think that favors Smart. I’d take Notre Dame’s coordinators over Georgia’s.
One more day of rest from the Indiana game probably very marginally helps Notre Dame, relative to what we would have seen yesterday. Two more days of rest than their opponent next week probably very marginally helps Penn State.
It looks like there are going to be a lot of empty seats at the Superdome, especially since resale prices were already less than half of face value coming into the week. The crowd should be relatively flat. I don’t know if quiet favors either team, and weighing socioeconomics and geography and everything else, I don’t know if one team will see more fans leave town than the other.
Overall, then? It seems like it’s probably a wash, but the uncertainty’s a lot higher. This is a sad game now. This is not what every other playoff game has ever been.
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The numbers, really quickly:
- Movelor has Ohio State favored by 8.2 points over Texas.
- Movelor has Ohio State up to nearly a 50/50 favorite to win the national championship.
- Oregon dropped below Notre Dame in Movelor’s rankings, but not below Penn State. The top four is still all the Big Ten and Notre Dame. We’ll find out shortly whether that’s misleading.
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