Why Ohio State Lost to Florida in the So-Called National Championship Game

Like most sports fans, I was surprised to learn of Florida’s upset of Ohio Sate in the current version of college football’s mythical national championship, the BCS National Championship Game. Seemingly every expert, pundit, or oddsmaker had installed the Buckeyes as prohibitive favorites. It came as a collective shock when Florida managed not just to pull off the unlikely upset, but instead opened the proverbial can of whoopass in a 41-14 rout, with observers commenting that the final score could have been much worse had Florida not gone out of its way to not score in the 4th quarter.

Upsets dot the sporting landscape. David does beat Goliath, from time to time, when his slingshot is true. What David doesn’t usually do is crush Goliath so bad that David has to go easy on the suddenly gentle giant, lest he embarrass the big fella. Had Ohio Sate lost a nail biter, a la Houston’s Phi Slamma Jamma getting stunned at he Buzzer by NC State in the NCAA final in 1983, or had they simply been defeated decisively in a competitive but losing effort, like heavily favored Green Bay to Denver in the 1998 Super Bowl upset, none of us would be wondering “what happened to Ohio State?” But after the beat down last Monday night, the question lingers.

The most popular theory floated to date is that the 50 day layoff between the Buckeyes’ last game and the BCS final, the longest layoff between regular season and bowl game in college football history, was the root cause of Ohio State’s listless performance. By all accounts, the Buckeyes were as dull as the Gators were sharp. If there is a word for the Buckeyes’ play, it is one of the most damning words in sports, “flat.” According to the 50-day layoff theory, an extra week off somehow translated into an emotional no-show by college football’s number one team in the biggest game any of the Buckeyes had ever played in. You’re telling me that an extra week of practice leading up to the game meant that the Buckeyes somehow couldn’t get up for college football’s Super Bowl, the game for All The Marbles?

As they say across the pond, bollocks! Ohio State did get up for the Super Bowl, and they won. Only the Super Bowl happened 50 days earlier, in the state of Ohio, when the Buckeyes defeated their archrival, the Michigan Wolverines. It says here that the reason Florida wiped the field with the Buckeyes is because the Gators played as if the national championship was the biggest game of the year, and the Buckeyes played as if they had already won the biggest game of the year 50 days prior. Intellectually, all of the Buckeyes’ players probably realized that the national championship was supposed to mean more than the Michigan game. But emotionally, they knew that it did not.

Did the Buckeyes’emotions, or lack thereof, betray them when it seemingly mattered most? I’d argue that the Buckeyes’ EQ was working just fine last Monday, despite the misinformation that their intellect was supplying. Because at Ohio Sate, especially in a year when the Buckeyes and Wolverines are undefeated and ranked, respectively, #1 and #2, the Ohio State-Michigan game IS the Super Bowl. College players get their signals from three primary sources, their coaches, the fans, and the media, and all three of these sources were sending the message to the Buckeyes loud and clear that the Michigan game was the one they absolutely had to win. I am not privy to what Coach Tressel tells his players, but I know that his predecessor won something like 90% of his games but couldn’t beat Michigan, and was unceremoniously fired. As long as he beats Michigan, Coach Tressel can lose every single bowl game and he’ll still have his job. Knowing this, Coach Tressel would be a fool not to treat the Michigan game as the Super Bowl. Any smart employee puts his greatest efforts into the area his boss says is job one.

As for the fans, I’d love to see the results of a poll asking the Buckeye faithful how they would choose between beating Michigan or winning a bowl game. Put it this way: if the Buckeyes go 12-1 and win the national championship during a year there is no undefeated team, and their one loss was to Michigan, many Buckeye fans would call that a bad year.

And the media, more than anyone, was invested in turning this year’s Michigan-Ohio Sate game into the next installment of The Game Of The Century. The media lives and dies by stories, and nothing makes a more compelling story than sworn enemies slugging it out for absolute supremacy. This year’s Ohio State-Michigan game gave the media the equivalent of USA vs.USSR in World War III, whereas Ohio State vs. Florida was more like Great Britain vs. Argentina for the Falkland Islands (only this time Argentina won). To think that such signals from the all-pervasive media did not influence the 19 and 20 year-old Buckeyes is hopeless naivete.

One final ingredient can not be ignored in the flatbread Ohio State served up Monday night. Call it a missing ingredient: the non-existent playoff system for Division I college football. As long as there is no playoff in college football, Ohio State-Michigan will always be bigger than any bowl game, no matter how they dress it up and no matter what they call it. In college basketball North Carolina vs. Duke is every bit the rivalry Ohio State vs. Michigan is in college football. But North Carolina could, God forbid, lose to Duke three times during the regular season and ACC Tournament, and if they went on to win the national championship everyone would act like they just won the lottery and paint Chapel Hill Tarheel blue. The losses to Duke would be chalked up as part of the competitive gauntlet that prepared the Tarheels to capture the greatest prize of all. All that because in college basketball the national championship is as real as real gets in the make-believe world of competitive game play. In college football the national championship remains a myth. Which means that whatever happened last Monday night, Ohio State can end the season with a resounding and genuine Mission Accomplished (although that might smack too much of another mythical victory, i.e. the mission in Iraq declared accomplished by our commander-in-chief that day aboard the aircraft carrier, a “Dewey Wins” scenario with far graver consequences for us all).