I spent Friday night and Saturday at Disney World with the family, so I only checked in on the games when I had a chance. I think we can say the 1st round games delivered in proving college football is different from the NFL and March Madness. Talent matters, and Bobby Hill is overrated.
Let’s start our trip in South Bend where Marcus Freeman’s defense destroyed Indiana’s hope of a Hoosier state title.
Imagine not winning a game against a team currently ranked in the top 25 and being splattered by the 1 you did play. Indiana, you were a cute story throughout the year, but you should have been playing in a New Year’s 6 bowl or having a nice postseason celebration of your season in a sunny locale. Instead, you are home for the holidays with the most empty calorie 11-2 record we’ve seen since Hawaii got scattered, smothered, covered and chunked in the 2008 Sugar Bowl.
On the Notre Dame side, your All-American tailback gained 108 yards and you had almost 200 yards on the ground … good for you. 98 of those came on one play. Let me just put it this way. You aren’t going to overwhelm the Georgia line of scrimmage.
Let’s move over to State College for the Death Penalty Bowl to check in on the Ponies.
I said last week that SMU was this year’s TCU except TCU won a playoff game. This game was the classic “the moment was too big and they pissed down their leg” Coach 30 moment. Penn State had 74 yards of offense and a 14-0 lead due to 2 pick 6s. At that moment, the game was out of reach.
The big question coming out of the first 2 games is whether either of these 2 schools were worthy of an at-large bid. I think it’s safe to say the answer is no.
Let’s move on to Austin for what would turn out to be the game of the weekend.
A really bad 2nd quarter dooms Dabo and the Tiggers. Clemson cuts the lead to 7 and then gives up a long TD run to put the game away. To the geniuses on TigerNet, who are you going to hire to take Dabo’s place? Clemson is still the team in the ACC best constructed to play deep into January. Is Dabo the best in-game coach? No way. Has he built a program and a culture that can stand the test of time? I think so. The problem is he doesn’t have a pair of championship-quality coordinators to lean on for game planning and recruiting.
I did find this troll to be humorous.
Let’s end the trip segment of the weekend in Columbus. Damn, why didn’t the meteor show up?
Tennessee social media and message boards could be the most toxic in the world of the CFB internet. I admit I got this one wrong … bad wrong. Tennessee got boat raced. Jeremiah Smith is a man. Nico is still way overrated. When you get outcoached by the Just for Men spokescoach, you pretty much suck.
What’s the excuse this time, Vols? Face it. Your coach runs up big numbers against inferior competition, finds magic for a game every other year (Bama in Kneeland), and looks lousy against teams that are superior.
There’s going to be a winter of discontent in Knoxville.
What does all of this mean for Georgia? While ND doesn’t scare me, they could be a tough out if we don’t have a good game plan for Gunner or our execution sucks … not a time for a slow start. Penn State feasted on a QB not ready for prime time. Our offensive line will have to play their asses off in a game with them. Texas and Ohio State are both troublesome. Hopefully, Gunner has settled in by the time we possibly get to one of them.
For a bonus feature, here are some tidbits from other boards over the weekend.
What did you see this weekend? Let us know in the comments below.
We have definitely seen the ceiling for Josh Heupel at UT. Here’s hoping they don’t recognize it themselves and keep him in place for the foreseeable future. Much like with the other UT, though- I’m sure the media will keep flogging their chosen narrative around the program, certain that if they repeat it enough times it will ultimately come true…
What are we talkin’ ’bout here? Dead horse’s asses or dead cattle?
I saw teams that just weren’t good enough to be in any type of playoff get boat raced by superior teams in their home stadiums. Indiana, SMU and Tennessee weren’t even competitive and it proves that 12 teams is too many.
Looking ahead, I don’t know how good Arizona State or Boise State are, but neither team deserves to be seeded as #3 or #4 and the days between games is ridiculous. Let the bowls play on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day and play the CFP games on Friday/Saturday!
Again, why in the HELL is the championship game played on a Monday night??? I understand that the people who make these decisions jobs are to be at that game, but the rest of us poor slobs have to work the next day.
At least with the Super Bowl the NFL normally plays on a Sunday – so it kind of makes sense (though I don’t like that either). But the only thing that colleges do on Mondays is play their championship games, and the only sports (FB & Men’s BB) are the ones that people actually stay up to watch. Other college sports usually play their championship games on SAT or SUN.
And get the heck off of my lawn!!! Damn kids….
Good question about playing the game on Monday. I never understood it but there must be a logical answer.
….because everything about CFP playoffs is logical, right?
Because ESPN wants it on Monday – Occam’s razor
We knew all along that there are rarely more than 2-3 teams that deserve to be the season champion. But Disney decided to create their invitational tournament so we can select a tournament champion and call them the national champion.
The only obvious answer to this mess is to add more teams so that we can make the few really good teams play a bunch more games. Eventually, one year, one or more of the good teams will lose a key player to injury and Disney will get their “Cinderella” tournament champion. Then the writers can all fellate themselves while telling us how great this is for the sport.
Man, I really miss college football. I’d be so pumped to be getting ready for a Sugar Bowl against Notre Dame. Now, meh. It just means another trip to another “bowl”.
I’m kind of surprised that Bobby Hill didn’t find some way to blame this ass whipping on the officials.
#1 Oregon gets tOSU. #2 Georgia gets ND. Texas and PSU get a second round of cupcakes. If I wanted to fuck up the college football postseason I could not have come up with anything worse. I’m assuming the old computer models will give way to ChatGPT AI to rank teams and set the brackets in the near future. And players paid in crypto so no one knows if anything can be trusted but there won’t be a committee to question.
Ha! I’ll fix them. I’ll use Grok to post my complaints!
AI ranking teams ain’t no problem, the playoff committee with all their conflicts of interest making decisions IS
Tennessee lost their stud RB, but it wouldn’t have made much difference.
ND matches up well for us. They want to try to out physical us, which is red meat for Kirby. We should be fine as long as we play our game.
Pedo State doesn’t scare me at all. SMU was moving the ball up and down the field but then the QB would piss down his leg and throw a pick 6. Someone check his betting history.
Arizona State should keep it close against Texas if Scattaboo can get some yards/chew up some clock. Otherwise, it will be another boring game.
If I was Lanning and Oregon, I’d be pissed at this laughable committee. They got screwed with the bracket they’re in.
I was wrong about Indiana. I didn’t think that they had the horses to match up to ND physically but I thought that they’d be able to scheme enough with the time off to be competitive and do things offensively to negate ND’s clear personnel advantages. I didn’t think that Indiana was one of the 12 best teams in the country, but I also didn’t think that a “playoff” game would be that humiliating.
Which brings us to SMU which also got humiliated. Definitely didn’t believe that SMU deserved to be in the playoff though I won’t deny that there was something satisfying about seeing Bama get left out. While Clemson got beaten soundly, I thought Klubnik played a pretty good game overall considering that without a running game he was thrust into the position of being Clemson’s only shot at winning the game (which he’s ill-equipped to do) and Clemson at least made it interesting down the stretch when they cut it to a one score game. ACC front office probably hit the bottle pretty hard around 7:30 PM on Saturday as any argument that the ACC deserved to have two teams in a “playoff” was gone.
I don’t even know what to say about Tennessee. Yet more “playoff” humiliation. Iamaleava was just overall bad on Saturday. WTF on his 104 passing yards and sub 50% completion percentage. Heupel should be embarrassed that his starting, multi-million dollar QB didn’t complete a forward pass until there were less than ten minutes to go in the second quarter. And the offensive line coach should be getting torched as Iamaleava was running for his life for most of the game. With all that time off from the Vanderbilt game, the game plan and scheme that Tennessee had on Saturday night on both sides of the ball was nothing short of shameful.
My immediate takeaway Saturday night was that Bama, Ole Miss, or South Carolina would have been better suited to match up to ND and Penn State. And the talking heads from ESPN making all the phony arguments about why teams that were in the playoff deserved to be there as each game was a resounding dud (other than the blip from Clemson) was humorous on some level and infuriating on every level.
My bigger picture takeaway is that with all the build up to the announcement of the final twelve teams, and the admittedly cool vibe of “playoff” football in home stadiums, the fact remains that in any given year there just aren’t twelve teams that can/should compete for a national championship. The jump from four teams to twelve teams was a joke and the gaslighting that it took from ESPN and others to ramp up the excitement about this year’s playoff was epic. What should be the talk of every CFB writer, pundit, and analyst, but won’t be, is that the impending jump in 2026 from twelve teams to fourteen or sixteen teams should be DOA and that December 20th and 21st of 2024 is Exhibit “A” in the argument as to why there should be playoff contraction rather than expansion.
Mickey does not approve of your “DOA” comment, Mickey doe$ believe in promotion vs demotion and when all is said and done, Mickey salutes the cfp demolition of college football…GO DAWGS!!
Of course. It was never about expanding to give other teams access. It was never about parity. It was never to give “a shot” to teams that couldn’t seem to find their way into the four team playoff. It was never because there was a belief that there are legitimately that many teams that have a chance to win it all. There was never a belief by anyone with any college football knowledge that expansion and the four first round games would create Cinderella stories like in the NCAA basketball tournament where some little guy with a deadly three point shooter gets hot or in the NCAA baseball tournament where someone has one or two stud pitchers because, bottom line, football isn’t like that. The results of this weekends games was, largely, part of the plan. Mickey made a lot more money than they would have with four teams or even eight teams and they spread a little of that additional money around.
Did y’all know that Ewers and Klubnik played against each other in Austin in the HS State final. Which was in Austin. Which was where the game on Saturday was played? Did y’all know that? Just wanted to make sure y’all heard that nugget.
Oh, and while we’re at it, David Greene and David Pollack played Pee Wee football together. Not sure if y’all knew that.
I did not know that. Did you know Ryan Williams is only 17?
I may have heard he’s the youngest player to lose to Vanderbilt. 😀
Rylie Mills, ND’s leading sacker and D captain is out for the season.
I spent the weekend in Atlanta taking my nephew and some friends to a Hawks game, the College Football Hall of Fame and a Falcons game. I’m not a basketball or pro football fan. Long story. I only got to watch a little college football. Any time Bobby Hill’s fat ass and delusional Vol nation is sent it’s nice to see. As the Senator used to like to say, you hate to see it, but more than that you live to see it.