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Updated: January 19, 2025 @ 4:54 am
Ohio State head coach Ryan Day celebrates after the Buckeyes beat Texas in a College Football Playoff semifinal game on Jan. 10.
A news article
Scott Hamilton is the sports columnist for the Post and Courier. Previous stops include SportsBusiness Journal, Golfweek and the Winston-Salem Journal. No, he doesn’t ice skate and he’s never eaten a s’more. But he once sat next to a rabbit on a train.
Ohio State head coach Ryan Day celebrates after the Buckeyes beat Texas in a College Football Playoff semifinal game on Jan. 10.
Notre Dame is likeable. The Ohio State-Michigan rivalry doesn’t carry much weight aside from bragging rights. And the College Football Playoff — an entity as analyzed, scrutinized and criticized as anything in sports — delivered on its promise.
And those are merely some of the subplots around Monday’s CFP Championship Game in Atlanta.
Let’s just call it the Redemption Bowl.
It’ll afford vindication opportunities for both teams, as well as the entire playoff system, regardless of the outcome.
Because we don’t get No. 8 Ohio State (13-2) vs. No. 7 Notre Dame (14-1) if there is no expansion to 12 teams. Instead, it would have been a four-school, all-SEC/Big Ten affair that doesn’t include the Buckeyes or the Fighting Irish. We’d watch some combination of Oregon, Texas, Georgia and Penn State play for all the marbles in Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
That wouldn’t have been horrible.
Yet, this matchup is better. It’s as legit as any we’ve had since the playoff launched in 2014. There aren’t many lingering questions, either, even if the selection process remains subjective.
After all, both teams took winding paths to validate their inclusion in the CFP; not getting opening-round byes and surviving a month of win-or-go home propositions.
Winning your way to a playoff instead of relying on the name across the front of your jerseys or the logo on your helmet.
What a novel idea.
Make no mistake — Notre Dame’s helmets are iconic. Still, who saw this matchup coming following the Irish’s 16-14 loss to Northern Illinois on Sept. 7?
That’s Notre Dame, sovereign and sole resident of the Power Independents, a bastion of higher learning with an endowment of $16.62 billion that gave us Joe Montana, some astronauts and a bunch of elected officials.
That’s Northern Illinois, middling member of the Group of 5, a public school with a $99.8 million endowment known for its foreign language studies, enduring an early 2000s money-laundering scheme called the Coffee Fund Scandal and claiming Caddyshack’s Lacy Underall (Real name: Cindy Morgan) among its notable alums.
It’s likely the ugliest defeat ever by a team playing for a national title. Definitely the worst in the CFP era. It was further blemished when the Huskies immediately lost to Buffalo and N.C. State en route to an 8-5 record and ho-hum finish in the Mid-American Conference.
Touchdown Jesus hung His head in shame.
“We were the embarrassment of college football at one point when we lost to NIU,” Notre Dame linebacker Jaylen Sneed, a Hilton Head High School alum, said.
Yet here they are, one game away from Notre Dame ending a 36-year championship drought. It’s the Irish’s best team since 1993 and their first chance to even play for a title since Manti Te’o taught us about catfishing. Bless his heart.
And bless Marcus Freeman’s heart.
Talk about a perfect coach at a perfect time. Few folks can pull off the magic acts he’s performed this season. He kept things from crumbling and guided the Irish to 13 straight wins — and with a roster that’s good, though not great, to boot.
Along the way, especially during the playoff, Freeman has made it easy to root for Notre Dame. That’s comparable to David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty vanish.
Check that: It’s more like Moses splitting the Red Sea.
Of course, it helps when you have Riley Leonard, an Opie Taylor of quarterbacks, serving up the following gems of perspective:
“After Northern Illinois, that’s when you start to think, like, dang,” Leonard said. “It was like, shoot, we weren’t even thinking about the playoff at that point. After that game, it was like, shoot, forget being the best team in the county. You’ve got to be the best team on the field every single week.”
He’s right, daggone it. Heckfire.
Speaking of miracles, there haven’t been any roving bands armed with pitchforks and torches marching along High Street in Columbus, Ohio. Or at least none yet reported beyond the banks of the Olentangy River.
Still, things there are pretty anxious. That’s the normal climate after losing to Michigan.
Now multiply that by four straight defeats to That Team Up North. Ohio State coach Ryan Day has likely explored beard-coloring options in case he needs to vanish.
Nevermind he’s a Saban-esque 69-10 since taking over in 2018 — it’s those four Ls to Michigan that define him. Plus, there’s the perception Day was “born on third base,” the implication being he was handed the keys to a Ferrari rather than learning to drive with a beater.
Whether that assessment is real or merely perceived doesn’t matter. It was cemented by former Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh. His words have a way of lingering in kind of the way the NCAA keeps lingering around Ann Arbor.
Jeff Thitoff, a host on 97.1 The Fan in Columbus as well as Fan Stream Sports, puts the Ohio State faithful into one of two buckets — Buckeye fans and Buckeye goobers.
Buckeye fans, he says, are “smart, reasonable fans” and that former and current players “love Day.” The goobers, according to Thitoff, are “lunatics” who wanted Day fired after the latest Michigan loss with visions of Mike Vrabel or Urban Meyer returning to save things.
That assessment is probably spot-on. Though it begs the question of which side contributed more toward building Ohio State’s vaunted $20 million roster? Prudent people invest prudently; the unhinged try to solve problems with money. It’s likely an even split.
Regardless, the bottom line in 2025 (and every year at least since the advent of the forward pass) should be that championships eclipse everything. They trump rivalry games, they trump individual awards, they trump regular-season records.
That means Monday’s game offers Day an opportunity for validation. It would also drive home the reality Michigan-Ohio State is no longer the end-all, be-all of the season; a team’s postseason fate is no longer determined by that singular game.
Therefore, Day, presumably, would seem to be good to go for at least another year simply by getting Ohio State to this point.
Presumably.
“There are still people that want to fire him if he doesn’t win Monday,” Thitoff said, “and even some that want him fired if he does win.”
So — as Leonard would frame it — Day is darned if he does, and darned if he doesn’t.
Bless his heart, too.
Follow Scott Hamilton on X @ScottHamiltonPC
Scott Hamilton is the sports columnist for the Post and Courier. Previous stops include SportsBusiness Journal, Golfweek and the Winston-Salem Journal. No, he doesn’t ice skate and he’s never eaten a s’more. But he once sat next to a rabbit on a train.
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