COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio State players had been thinking about a rematch with Oregon long before the Buckeyes crushed Tennessee in a first-round playoff game.

Their first chance to avenge the Oct. 12 loss to the Ducks looked to be the Big Ten championship game, but that slipped away when the Buckeyes lost to Michigan and gave up their spot in the title game.

Now, by virtue of Saturday night’s 42-17 win over Tennessee, the Buckeyes will see the Ducks again in a quarterfinal game on a grand stage — the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day.

“It’s going to be a heck of an opportunity for all of us,” Ohio State quarterback Will Howard said. “I think we’ve all been looking forward to this one, another crack at these guys. The way the last one ended didn’t sit right with me.”

In the first game, the Buckeyes led twice in the second half but couldn’t hold it. They were driving in the final minute. After a questionable interference penalty on freshman receiver Jeremiah Smith, Howard scrambled out of the pocket to extend a play and slid as time ran out, ending the 32-31 shootout on a mental error.

It would be the closest game of the season for top-seeded Oregon (13-0).

“We’re looking forward to the opportunity because it was not a great game for us,” Ohio State defensive coordinator Jim Knowles said. “And I know, quite frankly, the guys got a little pissed off. They used that game as motivation. So, I’m sure they’re looking forward to another opportunity.”

The Ohio State defense — now statistically the best in the nation — allowed Heisman Trophy finalist Dillon Gabriel and the Ducks to pile up 496 yards.

“You get to watch yourself play, and watch the mistakes that you’ve made, and you see how they attack you,” Ohio State linebacker Cody Simon said. “But also, there’s a lot of football played in between that. They’ve changed. We’ve changed, and we’re just, we’re going to look at what we need to do, and trust the game plan the coaches have, and we’ll go and tackle them.”

Nearly everything was working right inside the frigid Horseshow on Saturday night, the first December college football game in the history of the 102-year-old stadium.

Howard threw two touchdown passes to Smith and compiled 311 passing yards — his highest total since the Oregon game. TreVeyon Henderson and Quinshon Judkins rushed for two touchdowns apiece. The defense sacked Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava four times and limited him to 104 passing yards, his lowest total of the season.

Oregon coach Dan Lanning recognized the Buckeyes’ ability to be explosive.

“That’s an elite football that we just played,” Lanning said after the October game. “They’re really, really talented. They don’t have weaknesses.”

Other quarterfinal games include No. 6 seed Penn State against third-seeded Boise State on Dec. 31, and on Jan. 1 it will be No. 5 Texas against No. 4 Arizona State, and No. 7 Notre Dame versus No. 2 Georgia.

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COLUMBUS, Ohio — By the time the beating was finished, most of the thousands of Tennessee fans who flooded into Ohio Stadium were gone.

At least two remained — one in a Peyton Manning jersey and another in a coonskin cap — and hovered over the tunnel as the stone-faced Vols walked into the beginning of the end of their season.

They offered encouragement and some high fives in contrast to the derisive “S-E-C” chant coming from the Ohio State student section as the Buckeyes celebrated a cherished Rose Bowl berth that eluded Tennessee.

Ohio State 42, Tennessee 17.

The Vols’ 21-0 hole after the game’s first 12 minutes was too deep to escape. Ohio State’s talent at edge rusher and receiver overwhelmed Tennessee.

Cutting the lead to 11 at halftime offered a brief glimmer of hope until Ohio State forced a punt on the second half’s first possession and followed up with a 65-yard touchdown drive to slam the door for good.

“Everybody was just disappointed,” Tennessee coach Josh Heupel said.

The offensive line struggled to provide quarterback Nico Iamaleava with clean pockets. Tennessee’s receivers couldn’t find space in the secondary, forcing Iamaleava to hold onto the ball and try to create an offense built from scraps of quarterback scrambles.

The secondary struggled to cover Ohio State’s stellar receivers and even when they did, freshman phenom Jeremiah Smith and NFL-bound senior Emeka Egbuka hauled in contested catches anyway.

“They made some plays. That’s gonna happen against a good team,” Heupel said. “What we didn’t do is come back and find a way to get on the right side of it. That’s defensively, offensively, it’s everybody.”

Nico Iamaleava on his 20 carries: “I didn’t expect to run that many times.”

Josh Heupel said some of those were him scrambling.

— David Ubben (@davidubben) December 22, 2024

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Injuries, Ohio State’s defense and the early struggles forced Tennessee to try to morph on the fly into a team it isn’t.

Dylan Sampson, the SEC’s Offensive Player of the Year, suffered a hamstring injury late in the regular-season finale against Vanderbilt and aggravated the injury early on Saturday. Tennessee knew entering the game Sampson would be limited, but he was barely available and couldn’t continue after briefly returning in the second half.

He carried the ball at least 19 times in every SEC game this season. He carried the ball twice on Saturday.

Iamaleava hadn’t run the ball more than a dozen times all season. Between called runs and scrambles, he had to carry the ball 20 times. The Vols’ longest passing play of the day was just 21 yards. Iamaleava finished with a season-low 104 passing yards despite throwing the ball 31 times, just the third time this season he’s topped 30 attempts in a game.

“It sucks to go out that way,” Iamaleava said. “That’s not who we are, man.”

He averaged 8.3 yards per attempt during the regular season, good for 21st nationally. He averaged 3.3 yards per attempt on Saturday.

“When we’re not creating explosives, whether it’s poor calls or execution, it puts you in a phone booth,” offensive coordinator Joey Halzle said. “We didn’t stretch them enough. We didn’t force them to respect us going by them enough to make them change up what they were doing. When you let them play comfortable and play in their game plan and don’t make them change, it creates long nights like what happened tonight.”

The defense gave up 311 yards through the air to Will Howard, a quarterback who had just one 300-yard game this season. Tennessee had surrendered 300 passing yards in just one other game this year, to Carson Beck and Georgia.

The Vols lost by 25 in a game in which they won the turnover battle, 1-0.

“Their skill on both sides of the ball was as good as you’ll see,” Heupel said.

Defensive coordinator Tim Banks said the Buckeyes offense didn’t do much the Vols hadn’t prepared for on film. They just did it well and consistently won 1-on-1 matchups.

A breakthrough season crescendoed to the program’s first College Football Playoff bid and arguably the biggest game for the program in at least two decades.

Tennessee fans flooded into Ohio Stadium by the thousands. Instead of witnessing another breakthrough, they were forced to shiver through a breakdown on the sport’s biggest stage and a game that was barely competitive, just like the three first-round games that preceded it.

The only matchup of Big Ten and SEC teams in Round 1 produced the most lopsided result of the opening weekend of the expanded Playoff, with the Big Ten team’s players parading around their home field with roses between their teeth.

Tennessee has looked the part of a good team all season, but losses to Georgia and Ohio State laid bare the reality that the Vols have yet to ascend into the sport’s upper crust and aren’t ready to chase the kinds of titles that have eluded the program since 1998.

Ohio State’s offensive game plan showed aggression and a desire to stretch the field early, making it clear that Tennessee would not be facing the same Buckeyes team that lost a brawl at the line of scrimmage against Michigan three weeks ago.

The Vols came up against one of the nation’s most talented teams. For 60 minutes, the Buckeyes looked the part, flexing at Tennessee’s expense.

“It stings losing like that,” linebacker Will Brooks said.

It was tough to swallow for Heupel, who used the word “disappointed” 10 times in his 14 minutes with reporters after the loss. Multiple times, he was left shaking his head.

He saw the same thing that the thousands of fans in orange witnessed, too.

“Disappointed in our performance for our fans,” Heupel said. “People that have watched us, it wasn’t our best football tonight.”

But it’s the football Tennessee will be left to ponder as it enters an offseason that started earlier than anyone in orange hoped. As Heupel addressed his team, he began by using that word, acknowledging the disappointment of Tennessee’s first trip to the Playoff before pointing to the future after closing a stretch of 30 wins in three seasons.

“Everybody better let that soak in,” Heupel said, “and it’s gotta propel you to whatever’s next.”

(Photo of Nico Iamaleava: Saul Young / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Are you not entertained?

No, you’re probably not.

Four College Football Playoff first-round games, four outcomes by at least two scores. Two of those were outright blowouts (in State College and Columbus), a third was a dud made closer with two late touchdowns (in South Bend) and a fourth in Austin featured our only suspenseful fourth-quarter moments (thank you, Clemson).

Here in Columbus, the Buckeyes left us wondering a couple of things after a 42-17 drubbing of Tennessee:

Why couldn’t they do this against Michigan?

Are they back to being the favorites to win it all?

Perhaps, they are! After all, no other college roster is more talented, as they reminded us Saturday night in capping college football’s first-ever slew of on-campus playoff games.

Let’s take a look at how ugly this got so quickly. Ohio State’s first punt came with four minutes left in the second quarter. Tennessee’s first pass completion came six minutes into the second quarter. Suddenly, it was 21-0 and the more than 25,000 Tennessee fans who made the journey north were left angry and shivering in wind chills of below 20 degrees.

The Buckeyes (11-2) showed what they can do when they’re cooking and, boy, were they cooking. By cooking, we mean targeting two of the most explosive and talented receivers in the country. Jeremiah Smith and Emeka Egbuka tore through the Vols for 11 catches and nearly 200 yards.

Toss in an Ohio State defensive front that swarmed first-year starter Nico Iamaleava and the Buckeyes were well on their way to a win that should lower the heat on the Ryan Day Pressure Cooker, from boiling to less boiling. Afterward, even Day acknowledged that he and the coaching staff called Saturday’s game “more aggressively” than that last outing here against Michigan.

“You’re defined by the way you handle adversity in life,” he said. “To see the way they responded, they had a look in their eye.”

Up next: a rematch against Big Ten champion Oregon in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day — a glorious matchup of a team with college football’s best resume against a team with college football’s most talented roster.

Last time they met, back in October, the Ducks won 32-31 on a last-second finish in a thriller in Eugene. Whether these two should be meeting again so early in a 12-team playoff is certainly a question worth pondering.

But, alas, that’s what the format giveth. Instead of seeding teams based on the CFP selection committee’s rankings, the format calls for the four highest-ranked conference champions to be seeded Nos. 1-4 — a rule that, while understandable as an incentive for league champs, creates unbalanced seeding.

For instance, the committee’s No. 6-ranked team, Ohio State, was seeded eighth and now is pitted against the top seed in the quarterfinals. Look for the format to undergo changes, potentially starting with this very seeding rule that grants byes to only conference champions, as explained in this story last week.

But back to those blowouts.

The ACC got knocked out in the first round, its champion downed by the SEC’s runner-up and its runner-up crushed by the Big Ten’s runner-up (if you’re debating conference strength, those results should be helpful). The Big Ten’s third-best team took down the SEC’s third-best team in Columbus. And Notre Dame quite easily handled the Big Ten’s fourth-best team.

In all, the winners scored 145 points and the losers 68. All higher seeds and home teams won.

Chalk, is what they call it.

This doesn’t necessarily mean these teams — SMU and Indiana, in particular — should have missed the playoff field. Perhaps it only means that, in college football at least this year, the separation between those great teams and those good teams is a wider gap than we first realized.

This isn’t completely new. Don’t you remember all those CFP semifinals the last decade? Fourteen of the 20 semifinal matchups resulted in outcomes of at least two scores. Eight of those were at least three-touchdown blowouts.

It happens.

But what it does tell us, as someone here in the Ohio Stadium press box whispered to this writer, “Maybe this will show everyone that we shouldn’t expand anymore.”

Fourteen teams? Sixteen?

Maybe not.

And it’s now up to Boise State and Arizona State to prevent a nightmare for many college football fans and stakeholders: an All-SEC/Big Ten/Notre Dame semifinal.

The Sun Devils meet Texas in the Peach Bowl, and the Broncos tangle with Penn State in the Fiesta. Boise State and ASU were ranked No. 9 and No. 12 by the committee but got the third and fourth seeds because of that pesky conference title rule we earlier mentioned.

Can they deliver? As underdogs against the sport’s big brands, they’ll have plenty across the country rooting for them.

Meanwhile, in Pasadena, we’ll get what many expected in the preseason to maybe be a national title game matchup: Oregon vs. Ohio State.

It’s a mouthwatering duel, backdropped by the sunset over the San Gabriel Mountains. In fact, as midnight struck here in Columbus, Rose Bowl officials readied dozens of single cut roses to be handed to Ohio State players and coaches.

What a difference that three weeks makes, huh? The last game here ended in an embarrassing midfield flag-planting brawl and a shocking loss to three-touchdown underdog Michigan — a fourth consecutive defeat to the Wolverines in this heated rivalry series and one that seemed to turn off some fans here.

“You don’t just move on from the game,” Day said. “You identify the issues and let the players speak. You put a plan together to get these things fixed. To say it doesn’t weigh on you, it does. These guys have a lot of pride.”

Despite efforts from Ohio State administrators, many Buckeyes fans sold away their tickets to this playoff bout. Visiting teams get 3,500 tickets to CFP first-round games. The Vols brought at least 25,000 strong, peppering this 102,000-seat stadium in orange. It was more visiting fans than some long-time Ohio State reporters had ever seen in this venue.

By the start of the fourth quarter, many of them were gone, exiting into the chilly night for the jaunt down Interstate 71 having suffered what was the ugliest of the first-round blowouts. After all, OSU out-gained Tennessee 473-256 in yards and played its third-string — third-string — quarterback in the final minutes.

As a final goodbye on this cold Saturday night, Ohio State stadium operators played over the speakers a familiar refrain for those in orange: Rocky Top.

Back to Tennessee they went. And off to L.A. go the Buckeyes, deliverers of the most crushing win of this historic weekend in the sport.