Playoff review: What just happened?
The College Football Semi-finals had a pair of wild and exciting games. Who won and how did those games unfold?
It’s only fair to say I went 0-2 in my semi-final breakdowns, even after heralding how my theories and observations have been pretty good at sussing out playoff competitors and prognosticating championships.
A difficulty to this year was the lack of a good, pro-spread offense. Ohio State made a decent go at it, but they were missing a playoff caliber D-line to prevent Georgia from doing what playoff contenders tend to do.
Georgia got too far behind to run the ball as much as they’d surely have liked, but their three running backs turned 16 carries into 154 yards at 9.6 ypc with one touchdown. I was right to hammer Ohio State’s lack of quality inside on defense. Yet I picked Ohio State to win because I thought their passing game was liable to inflict as much or more damage than the Georgia run game. It did with Stroud throwing 34 passes for 348 yards at 10.2 ypa with four touchdowns to zero picks.
But Stetson Bennett made seemingly every fourth quarter throw, Ryan Day made some iffy calls at the end of the game with a chance to set up the winning field goal, and the Bulldogs won. I probably should have given the nod to Kirby Smart and Stetson Bennett as proven winners over 3rd base Day and the Buckeyes but the dynamics of that game were pretty tricky to suss out.
Meanwhile the other game…just a completely wild showing where one of the main questions has to be who overlooked TCU more? Ian Boyd or the Michigan Wolverines? I’ll be stewing on that miss on my own part for a long time.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to America's War Game to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.