Round 1 takeaways
Home favorites came up huge in round one of the playoffs. What else did we learn from this round of action?
You know, I think maybe teams having home field advantage for playoff games was actually a big advantage.
Vegas clearly had a good sense of that and their subsequent point spreads for round two make more sense to me than the round one spreads did last week. I realize now I was analyzing these games primarily as neutral site competitions that would come down to matchup fundamentals. In fact, the level of atmosphere for playoff games was up there like you’d get from a big time gameday contest but with playoff focus and stakes layered on top.
So, what’d we get? Home favorites rolled.
Indiana got buried early against Notre Dame and lost by 10.
Kevin Jennings melted down, wait no delete, he froze up in the cold weather of Pennsylvania and the Nittany Lions whooped the Mustangs by 28.
Clemson took it to the Texas defense a little in the second half but were absolutely helpless against the Longhorn run game and lost by 14.
Most shockingly of all, Tennessee invaded the North, tried to plant a flag in Columbus, and found out late in the process that was a bolder endeavor than perhaps they thought. They lost by 25 points.
Not a single competitive game, although Clemson at least made things interesting a few times, not even a single cover. Next year I need to remember that winning road playoff games in college football against top teams is really dang hard and you can get blasted.
Maybe big bowl reps trying to push a narrative all week that these games wouldn’t sell and were a mistake were able to fool me. Anyways, I feel dumb for missing this dynamic. I knew Vegas was probably considering a factor I’d missed but didn’t give it enough thought to discern what it was.
Here’s one more take before I break down some of the action. I noticed some people are complaining about the quality of the games and whatnot. People love to find things to complain about, I get it, complaining is fun. I’ve had a bunch of complaints about how they seed this fledgling tournament. Here’s the deal though, none of these teams would have been playing for a title in any previous system. So they would have drawn these sorts of matchups in bowl games and all the best players would have shut down their seasons for the draft. Instead? They all played hard for an outside shot at a title.
Isn’t that a huge win? But sure, expanding to 12 in the playoffs includes teams with no realistic shot to win. I don’t know why that’s something that needs to be decried. The only thing that’s silly is who gets the top four seeds, as the next round may make clear.