Ohio
Tennessee overwhelmed in humbling Playoff loss at Ohio State: ‘It stings’
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.
GO DEEPER
Tennessee fans’ orange invasion of Ohio Stadium: ‘Don’t tell us we can’t do that’
“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
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)
Matt Hardigree
Read All My Posts »
Ohio State enters the 2026 season as the reigning national champion’s chief rival for preseason hype — ranked No. 1 in ESPN’s initial Football Power Index and the trendy pick in several outlets’ way-too-early bracket projections. But before any of that matters, the Buckeyes have to get through a schedule that their own athletic department has openly called one of the toughest in the country. The question worth asking isn’t whether Ohio State is talented enough to win a title. It’s whether this slate is rugged enough that even a very good Buckeyes team could stumble to 9-3 — and if it does, whether that’s still good enough for the College Football Playoff.
By the school’s own count, nine of the Buckeyes’ 12 regular-season opponents either reached the CFP or played in a bowl game in 2025, and seven of them won at least nine games that season. Add up the 2025 records of Ohio State’s nine Big Ten opponents and you get a combined winning percentage north of .600 — a brutal number for a conference slate.
A few things stand out immediately:
Five true road games, including trips to two teams that made the 2025 CFP semifinals. The season opens with a Week 2 rematch at Texas, closing out the home-and-home series after Ohio State’s narrow 14-7 win in Columbus last year, followed later by a trip to Indiana on October 17th, the reigning national champion, and a first visit to USC since 2008 on October 31st. The Buckeyes will also make their first trip to Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium since 2017. Road trips to Texas, Iowa, Indiana, USC and Nebraska leave almost no margin for error away from the Horseshoe.
A CFP semifinalist at home, too. Oregon comes to Columbus on November 7th. Only two Big Ten teams have posted winning records against Ohio State this decade — Michigan and Oregon — and the Buckeyes will host both within the final four weeks of the regular season.
The Michigan game closes the regular season again, on Nov. 28, with a trip to Indiana and a home date with Oregon both looming in the weeks before it. A closing stretch of Indiana (road), Oregon (home) and Michigan (home), separated only by Northwestern and Nebraska, is about as demanding a finish as any team in the country will face.
Why 9-3 Is a Real Possibility, Not a Doomsday Scenario
Ohio State’s roster is loaded. Quarterback Julian Sayin returns after a Heisman-finalist redshirt freshman campaign, and Jeremiah Smith — already the most productive receiver in program history through two seasons — is back for one more year in Columbus. Ohio State ranks among the national leaders in returning offensive production, bringing back roughly seven in ten snaps’ worth of output from a year ago.
But the defense that carried Ohio State to the 2024 national title and a Big Ten title game appearance in 2025 was gutted by the NFL Draft. The Buckeyes had four players go in the first 11 picks of the 2026 draft, three of them defenders — receiver Carnell Tate plus linebackers Arvell Reese and Sonny Styles, and safety Caleb Downs. As a result, the defense returns only about half of last season’s production, a figure that ranks in the bottom third nationally. That’s a real question mark heading into a schedule with almost no easy weeks after October.
There’s also a late-season track record worth noting. Through 12 games in 2025, Ohio State looked nearly unbeatable, winning everything but the Texas opener by an average score of roughly 39-8. But when it came time to close, the offense stalled — the Buckeyes managed a combined 24 points in losses to Indiana in the Big Ten title game and Miami in the CFP quarterfinals, both defeats built around an overly conservative approach late in games. If a similarly cautious style resurfaces against this year’s closing gauntlet of Indiana, Oregon and Michigan, three losses in that stretch alone isn’t far-fetched.
Put it together — a true road loss at Texas, Indiana or USC, a slip-up somewhere in the Oregon-Michigan stretch, maybe an upset bid from Iowa or Nebraska — and 9-3 isn’t a pessimistic outcome. It’s a very plausible one for a team replacing this much defensive production while playing this schedule.
So Would 9-3 Be Enough for the Playoff?
Here’s where the format matters as much as the record. The CFP is staying at 12 teams in 2026, but the automatic-qualifier rules changed after realignment talks between the Big Ten and SEC broke down without a deal on expansion. Each Power Four conference champion — from the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and SEC — is now guaranteed a spot regardless of final ranking. The highest-ranked Group of Six team also earns an automatic bid, and Notre Dame can qualify as an independent if it finishes in the top 12. Everyone else fills out the field as at-large selections, seeded purely by the committee’s final rankings, with only the top four teams overall earning first-round byes.
That structure gives a 9-3 Ohio State two realistic paths in:
Path 1: Win the Big Ten. If the Buckeyes go 9-3 but that includes a Big Ten Championship Game win, they’re in automatically — no ranking required, no committee debate. Given the schedule, a 9-3 team that beats Indiana, Oregon and/or Michigan somewhere along the way to Lucas Oil Stadium and wins there would carry more than enough quality wins to make that plausible.
Path 2: An at-large bid on the strength of schedule. If Ohio State doesn’t reach the title game, a 9-3 at-large case becomes a resume argument — and here the Buckeyes’ brutal slate actually works in their favor. A 9-3 record built on wins over the likes of Texas, Indiana, USC, Oregon or Michigan, with all three losses coming against genuinely strong opponents, is a very different case than a 9-3 team that padded its record against a soft schedule and lost to mediocre teams. The selection committee has rewarded strength of schedule and a “best three losses” argument over a cleaner record built on a weaker slate; in 2025, an 8-5 Duke team with no marquee wins was left out entirely, while 10-3 Alabama got in on the strength of who they played and beat.
The math gets tighter, though, if other Big Ten contenders also finish with strong resumes. Analysts already project this could be a three-bid year for the conference, with Oregon, Ohio State and Indiana viewed as the league’s strongest playoff bets and several others given outside chances. If Indiana, Oregon and Ohio State all finish somewhere in the 9-3 to 11-1 range, seeding — and head-to-head results — will matter enormously. An Ohio State team that lost directly to one of its direct competitors could find itself squeezed out if the at-large math gets crowded near the bottom of the field.
The Bottom Line
Ohio State’s 2026 schedule is genuinely one of the hardest in the country — five true road games, two CFP semifinalists on the slate, and a closing stretch of Indiana-Oregon-Michigan that would stress-test any roster, let alone one replacing three defensive first-round picks. A 9-3 finish wouldn’t reflect a team underachieving; it would reflect a team that played one of the nation’s toughest schedules and lost a few close ones to elite competition.
Under the current 12-team format, that record should still be good enough for the Playoff in most realistic scenarios — either by winning the Big Ten outright, which comes with an automatic bid regardless of ranking, or by leaning on strength of schedule to win the at-large argument. The one situation where it gets dicey is if Ohio State’s three losses include head-to-head defeats to the same Big Ten teams — Indiana, Oregon — it’s competing against for playoff positioning, and the conference ends up sending three or four teams that all finish with similar records. In that crowded scenario, being 9-3 with the wrong losses could matter more than being 9-3 at all.
For a program that’s made the field in three of the first three years of the expanded Playoff, the safer bet is still that 9-3 gets Ohio State in. But this schedule means the Buckeyes will have to earn every bit of that resume.
Follow
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (WKBN) – A downtown Youngstown business is expanding.
Yosteria celebrated the grand opening of its new space–the enoteca at Yosteria.
The owners modeled the space after a traditional wine bar in Italy, which is known as an “enoteca.”
The space located in the backyard of the property features an expanded wine list–their own in-house made wine and full bar options.
The owners say the expansion helps bring their original vision to life, showcasing a wide variety of Italian cuisine.
“We have strong southern Italian roots here,” co-owner Alex Zordich said. “We have a lot of southern Italian food, but we also have a lot of central northern. It’s fine introducing those fruits even to the Southern Italians here. So we’re excited about the wine aspect of that to just continue to educate.”
“There are so many Indigenous grapes in Italy, hundreds and hundreds, and we want to show you the different expressions of wine and how they, you know, they pair with food and just all the different wines that Italy has to offer,” co-owner Frank Tuscano added.
The owners say if you would like to check the new space out, reservations are highly recommended.
You can make those over on their website or by calling the restaurant.
-
Los Angeles, Ca1 hour agoRitzy Pasadena hotel settles lawsuit for allegedly price gouging wildfire victims
-
Detroit, MI1 hour agoBrother Nature at Night: Jack’s backyard & kayaking the Huron River
-
San Francisco, CA2 hours agoHardin Fire in Napa County burns 55 acres near Pope Valley
-
Dallas, TX2 hours agoFormer Dallas ISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa runs for Dallas Mayor
-
Miami, FL2 hours agoSouth Florida mother arrested for leaving daughter chained to fence, police say
-
Boston, MA2 hours agoBoston man charged after allegedly assaulting Burger King employee, punching customer
-
Denver, CO2 hours agoDenver Country Club caddie earns full-ride Evans Scholarship, becomes first in family to attend college
-
Seattle, WA2 hours agoSeattle very much in running for another World Cup
