And now, 12 Final Thoughts from the first weekend of the first-ever 12-team College Football Playoff.

1. The first on-campus Playoff game kicked off at 8:10 p.m. ET in front of 77,622 roaring fans at Notre Dame Stadium. You didn’t have to be in the 25-degree South Bend weather to get the chills. Anyone watching on TV could appreciate the magnitude of this moment for a sport that has only ever played its postseason at bowl games and neutral sites.

The honeymoon lasted about 40 minutes, until Indiana fell behind Notre Dame 14-0 and the first wave of complaints began. The wrong team(s) got in. The game(s) were boring. Twelve teams was too many. Or too few.

Twenty-seven hours later, Ohio State completed the fourth home blowout of the first round, an anticlimactic ending to such an anticipated weekend. Maybe the committee did a bad job. Maybe it was the weather. Or … maybe Notre Dame, Penn State, Texas and Ohio State are really good teams.

2. The eighth-seeded Buckeyes were the biggest wild cards coming into the weekend. Who knew where their heads would be three weeks removed from their Michigan nightmare? Many of the fans who booed them off the field that day apparently stayed home for this one, as tens of thousands of orange-clad Tennessee fans infiltrated the Horseshoe.

Well, those concerns went out the window before the end of the first quarter. Ohio State raced to a 21-0 lead en route to a 42-17 demolition of the ninth-seeded Vols. The Buckeyes’ star-studded offense did whatever it wanted, starting with quarterback Will Howard’s best performance of the season: 24 of 29 for 311 yards, two touchdowns and one interception. Tennessee’s cornerbacks had no answers for receivers Jeremiah Smith (six catches, 103 yards, two TDs) and Emeka Egbuka (five catches, 81 yards), and running back TreVeyon Henderson (14 touches, 134 yards, two TDs) was electrifying.

Only head coach Ryan Day and offensive coordinator Chip Kelly can say why Ohio State’s offense has so rarely played to its potential, or why it flat-out no-showed against Michigan. But this version could win a national championship.

3. How would you like to be No. 1 seed Oregon watching that game? The Ducks went undefeated, including beating Ohio State at home in a classic — and now they’ve got to go play the Buckeyes again in the quarterfinals? While Penn State gets Boise State? Seems like a bug.

But it’s going to make for a fantastic Rose Bowl — and a classic Big Ten-Pac-12 matchup, no less. Dillon Gabriel and the Ducks get my benefit of the doubt because they’ve been more consistent all season and they’ll be well-rested. But remember, Ohio State was on the verge of winning their first meeting before that back-breaking offensive pass interference call on Smith. And Howard will be out for revenge after his last-second clock miscue cost the Buckeyes their last shot.

Texas racked up 292 rushing yards vs. Clemson. (Tim Warner / Getty Images)

4. No. 5 seed Texas has been at its best this season when the running game gets cranked up, and that’s exactly what happened in Saturday’s 38-24 win over No. 12 seed Clemson. Tailbacks Jaydon Blue (14 carries, 146 yards, two long touchdowns) and Quintrevion Wisner (15 carries, 110 yards, two TDs) became the first Longhorns tandem since 2022 to both go over 100 yards. Texas advances to the Peach Bowl, where it will meet Big 12 champion Arizona State and will be expected to win. The Sun Devils got much better as the season went on, and star running back Cam Skattebo finished fifth in the Heisman voting, but man, Texas’ defense is really good. And this time it’s not playing Georgia in Atlanta.

GO DEEPER

Texas, a complete but imperfect team, looks poised to make deep Playoff run

5. Clemson finished with four losses for the second straight season, but quarterback Cade Klubnik gives the Tigers hope for 2025. After falling behind 31-10 in the third quarter, Klubnik got Clemson back within one score despite the Tigers being down their top two running backs. Klubnik finished 26 of 43 for 336 yards, three touchdowns and an interception and had more rushing attempts (13) than his teammates (11), but he got no help from Clemson’s defense. Two plays after Clemson cut it to 31-24, Texas’ Blue dashed 77 yards for the dagger touchdown.

Dabo Swinney recently signed his first-ever defensive player out of the transfer portal, Purdue end Will Heldt. Now he just needs a few more.

6. Penn State’s 38-10 rout of SMU must have been cathartic for the 100,000-plus in Beaver Stadium, even if it meant becoming popsicles for four hours. Nittany Lions fans have spent much of the past eight years getting let down in big games, but this performance was emphatic. Two pick sixes in the first 17 minutes got the crowd roaring, and it soon became apparent that SMU’s offense stood no chance against Kobe King, Abdul Carter, Dominic DeLuca and Dani Dennis-Sutton. Penn State’s own offense was hardly overpowering (5 yards per play), but it didn’t need to be. Mustangs quarterback Kevin Jennings (20 of 36, 195 yards, one touchdown, three interceptions) struggled badly against the best defense he’s faced, while SMU managed just 58 rushing yards on 36 attempts.

Penn State’s defense overwhelmed SMU in a 38-10 rout. (Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)

7. Penn State now heads to the Fiesta Bowl, where its rushing defense gets a next-level challenge in No. 3 seed Boise State and Heisman runner-up Ashton Jeanty, who has 2,497 yards and 29 TDs on the ground this season. James Franklin’s team will likely be a heavy favorite for a second straight game. (It opened as a 10.5-point favorite, per BetMGM.) Thanks to this tournament’s funky seeding, the Nittany Lions managed to draw the committee’s No. 9 (Boise) and No. 10 (SMU) teams in their first two games. Top seeds Oregon (against No. 6 Ohio State) and Georgia (against No. 5 Notre Dame) have tougher quarterfinal draws than Penn State, which has the second-best odds to make the title game (40 percent), according to The Athletic’s model.

It’s a golden opportunity for Franklin’s team in its biggest postseason game since the 2017 Rose Bowl against USC.

8. If you thought the bickering from three weeks ago over the final spots in the bracket would be rendered moot once the games started … you must be new here. Just like in the BCS and the four-team CFP, every lopsided postseason game becomes a retroactive rallying cry for the team(s) left out. Even Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin, still miffed his 9-3 team didn’t get in (while pretending that home loss to 4-8 Kentucky never happened), took some shots at the committee during both the Notre Dame-Indiana and Penn State-SMU games. (He was noticeably silent during the Ohio State-Tennessee game.)

Look, SMU got embarrassed. But the committee boxed itself in when chairman Warde Manuel declared after their penultimate rankings that teams whose seasons had ended would not be reevaluated after the conference championship games. At that point, the story became whether SMU would get “punished” if it lost to Clemson (which it did). Given a truly blank slate, maybe the committee would have given someone like 10-2 BYU a second look. As it was, it faced considerable pressure to avoid “knocking SMU out” for playing a 13th game. And then the Mustangs lost on a 56-yard field goal. They had to be in.

GO DEEPER

SMU’s CFP humbling: A ‘shell-shocked’ Cinderella’s lesson about the big stage

9. No. 7 seed Notre Dame finally got its first BCS/CFP win, dominating No. 10 seed Indiana (the final score was 27-17, but it was 27-3 with two minutes to go) to set up a fascinating Sugar Bowl quarterfinal against No. 2 seed Georgia. In some ways the Irish and Bulldogs are mirror images: Both teams are physical on offense but with the ability to be explosive (see Jeremiyah Love’s 98-yard touchdown run Friday), and both have filthy defenses. Adding to the intrigue, Georgia is expected to be without injured quarterback Carson Beck, meaning backup Gunner Stockton will make his first career start against the nation’s top-rated pass defense.

But we may find out just how important those first-round byes can be. Whereas Georgia will have had 24 days of rest come Jan. 1, Notre Dame saw several key players suffer injuries 11 days out. Standout defensive tackle Rylie Mills went down clutching his knee after a sack and did not return. And starting right guard Rocco Spindler spent the second half in street clothes. The severity of those injuries is not yet known, though Marcus Freeman told ESPN that Mills’ injury was “not season-ending.”

GO DEEPER

There aren’t a lot of firsts at Notre Dame. This was one of them

10. Curt Cignetti’s Indiana was one of the best stories of the 2024 season, but boy did it end with a dud. It wasn’t just that the Hoosiers got blown out. The brash Cignetti, who just hours earlier on “College GameDay” proclaimed, “We don’t just beat Top 25 teams, we beat the s— out of them,” could not have coached more conservatively as IU punted from the Notre Dame 37 in the first quarter, settled for a field goal from the Irish 16 already down 14-0 and bafflingly punted down 20-3 in the fourth quarter.

Just like against Ohio State on Nov. 23, Indiana (11-2) was completely overmatched in the trenches, and quarterback Kurtis Rourke (20 of 33, 215 yards, two TDs, one interception) misfired to several open receivers. A disappointing ending to the program’s best season in a half-century.

Notre Dame beat Indiana in their first matchup since 1991. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)

11. With the game out of reach in the final minutes, ESPN’s Sean McDonough was not shy about questioning why Indiana, with its weak schedule, was included in the CFP in the first place. Kirk Herbstreit went in for more the next morning. In general, I agree with them that the committee needs to be more discerning about schedule strength in this age of 16/17/18-team conferences. Indiana will not be the last Big Ten or SEC team to win 11 games against empty calories.

But there was nobody else worth going to the mat for this season instead. The alternatives either lacked their own big wins (Miami), lost to bad teams (Alabama and Ole Miss) or lost to multiple other teams on the bubble (South Carolina).

It was only a few years ago people were complaining that the four-team CFP was mostly the same teams every year. I personally enjoyed the novelty of watching Indiana in a Playoff game. At least until that punt.

GO DEEPER

Feldman: Sorry, Lane Kiffin. Indiana earned its spot in the Playoff

Advertisement

12. That’s not to say I have no beefs with the new format. Reserving the first-round byes for conference champions was well-intended, but it had a profoundly unfair effect on the seeding this first year. The No. 3 (Boise State) and No. 4 (Arizona State) seeds, both champions, are double-digit underdogs in their quarterfinals to the Big Ten (Penn State) and SEC (Texas) runners-up. That’s not how a bracket is supposed to work.

And there’s one other flaw worth considering, now that we’ve experienced our first on-campus games: The top four seeds don’t get to hold their own. I myself love a trip to Pasadena, but I bet even Oregon fans would trade their Disneyland trip in exchange for Ohio State having to come back to Autzen Stadium.

But that’s not going to change in the next 10 days.

(Photo: Jason Miller / Getty Images)

San Jose State women’s volleyball star Brooke Slusser warned the NCAA after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the organization over transgender inclusion in women’s sports.

Paxton filed the lawsuit on Sunday, accusing the organization of deceptive marketing practices for allowing transgender women to compete against biological females. Paxton said in a news release the NCAA violated the Texas Trade Practices Act “which exists to protect consumers from businesses attempting to mislead or trick them into purchasing goods or services that are not as advertised.”

Slusser, who was a part of a lawsuit against her own school and the NCAA for allowing a transgender woman on the Spartans’ roster this season, posted about Paxton’s suit.

“Hey NCAA, just in case you haven’t realized yet this fight will just keep getting harder for you until you make a change!” Slusser wrote on X.

Slusser and other plaintiffs had asked a judge to grant an injunction to prohibit Blaire Fleming from competing in the Mountain West Conference women’s volleyball tournament last month, but they were denied.

SJSU RESPONDS TO VOLLEYBALL PLAYER MASS EXODUS AFTER TRANS ATHLETE SCANDAL ROCKED PROGRAM

Texas AG Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit on Sunday. (Dylan Hollingsworth/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

San Jose State made it to the finals of the tournament but lost to Colorado State.

Paxton accused the NCAA of “engaging in false, deceptive, and misleading practices by marketing sporting events as ‘women’s’ competitions only to then provide consumers with mixed sex competitions where biological males compete against biological females.”

“The NCAA is intentionally and knowingly jeopardizing the safety and well-being of women by deceptively changing women’s competitions into co-ed competitions,” Paxton said in a statement. “When people watch a women’s volleyball game, for example, they expect to see women playing against other women – not biological males pretending to be something they are not. Radical ‘gender theory’ has no place in college sports.”

Paxton said he was seeking a court to grant a permanent injunction to prohibit the NCAA from allowing transgender athletes in women’s sports in Texas or “involving Texas teams, or alternatively requiring the NCAA to stop marketing events as ‘women’s’ when in fact they are mixed sex competitions,” the news release said.

Charlie Baker, president of the NCAA, speaks during a press conference on Aug. 13, 2024, at the NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis. (Michelle Pemberton/IndyStar/USA Today Network)

The NCAA released a statement to Fox News Digital later Sunday.

“College sports are the premier stage for women’s sports in America, and while the NCAA does not comment on pending litigation, the Association and its members will continue to promote Title IX, make unprecedented investments in women’s sports and ensure fair competition in all NCAA championships,” the organization said.

Follow Fox News Digital’s sports coverage on X and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.

They arrived within six months of each other, two stars summoned to Cleveland as franchise saviors and the final pieces necessary for a championship run. 

The Cavaliers packed their arena with employees and team personnel in September 2022 to welcome Donovan Mitchell at his introductory news conference. It was a signal both internally and across the NBA that the Cavs were contenders again. But six months earlier, when Deshaun Watson took the podium in March for an introductory news conference, it felt more like an interrogation than a Browns coronation.

Two years later, the Cavaliers and Browns are in far different spaces. 

Mitchell is the fuel that has propelled the Cavs to the best record in the NBA. Watson is the fuel for the biggest grease fire in the history of the sport.

Two franchises, two high-stakes gambles. Two drastically different results. The parallels and outcomes between these teams that play their home games just a mile apart provide a fascinating case study in the risk, reward and repercussions of what happens when teams get franchise-altering trades right and when they go horribly wrong. 

Both Mitchell and Watson were stars in the prime of their careers upon arriving. Now that Mitchell has committed to the Cavs for the foreseeable future with a contract extension and the Browns will be picking the shrapnel of Watson’s contract out of their skin for years to come, it’s worth looking back and asking: How did the Cavs get it right and the Browns get it so very wrong?

Both franchises emerged from tedious rebuilds believing they were one piece away. The Cavs reached the Play-In Tournament in 2022 but were eliminated without winning a game. It was a breakthrough of sorts after a four-year rebuild, but the franchise wasn’t ready to commit big money to restricted free agent Collin Sexton. It was fortunate Mitchell became available when he did. 

#Cavs G Donovan Mitchell linked up with #Browns QB Deshaun Watson pregame. pic.twitter.com/srEWnJA4gO

— Camryn Justice (@camijustice) September 8, 2024

Advertisement

The Browns won a playoff game with Baker Mayfield in 2020. With one year remaining on his deal, they were hesitant to pay him the type of $250 million to $300 million contract that other top quarterbacks were commanding at the time.

Mayfield was good, but he wasn’t great (despite any revisionist history). There were maturity concerns. He was extremely polarizing in the locker room. And when the game was in the balance, he rarely delivered.

Watson was a three-time Pro Bowler who led the league in passing in 2020. A quarterback of his caliber, in the prime of his career, hadn’t become available in a trade since Fran Tarkenton in the 1960s. But Watson came with more baggage than Delta: 24 civil lawsuits alleging various forms of sexual misconduct during massages. 

The fact the Cavs and Browns are led by executives in Koby Altman and Andrew Berry who are close acquaintances only adds another compelling layer to all of this. Each executive agreed to trade three first-round picks in his deal. Altman added key players, including Sexton, and two pick swaps to give the Utah Jazz control of the Cavs’  five drafts from 2025 to 2029. The Watson trade included six draft picks, which the Houston Texans used to help win the AFC South last year and beat the Browns in a playoff game. 

Franchise quarterbacks never, ever become available through trades in the prime of their careers. The price of obtaining one is worth whatever the cost. 

Would a quarterback-starved team desperate to win trade its next five first-round picks for Josh Allen or Patrick Mahomes? How about six? 

There is no price too high. 

Had Mayfield not been up against a contract extension, maybe all of it ends differently for the Browns. An injury to his non-throwing shoulder only compounded his terrible 2021 season, but Mayfield struggled at times when he was healthy, too. 

Would the Browns be better off with Mayfield today over Watson? Of course, and that’s without including the three first-round picks they would have retained. But Mayfield needed to be humbled and needed to grow up. There’s no way of assuring that would’ve happened here. It occurred only because of his lousy play in Carolina and the fact he bounced around to four teams over two years. 

He has settled in nicely in Tampa and made a home for himself — on a $100 million contract that is still less than half of what the Browns would’ve had to commit to him at the time. 

See the difference? 

GO DEEPER

The Jameis Winston-led Browns offense is (almost) as bad as it was with Deshaun Watson

One of the great lessons to learn is how much character matters in trades of this magnitude. Mitchell arrived with no lawsuits hanging over him, no vile allegations of any kind. 

In fact, one of the first things he did was reach out to young stars such as Darius Garland to say he wasn’t arriving with the intention of taking over the locker room. Garland was coming off his first All-Star appearance. This was still his team, Mitchell told him. He was here to fit in and help where he could. 

It didn’t take long, of course, for Mitchell to emerge as the floor leader. But he didn’t move in on the first day and start rearranging the furniture and repainting the walls. It was an organic integration. He was a model teammate on the court and said publicly exactly what the Cavs needed from him as a leader of a young roster still trying to figure out how to win. 

Still, even the Mitchell trade came with enormous risk. There were the constant rumors about New York. Mitchell even acknowledged at his first press availability that he thought he was going home. He heard Cleveland emerge as a potential destination for about three days during the trade negotiations, then those whispers cooled again until the phone call telling him to pack his bags.

The Cavs were acutely aware of Mitchell’s desire to play in New York and traded for him anyway, believing two years was enough time to sell him on their franchise and a future in Cleveland. Winning a playoff series last season certainly helped. 

Any chance of Mitchell playing for the Knicks vanished when New York traded for OG Anunoby at the end of last December. When the Cavs flew to Paris in January for a game against the Brooklyn Nets, Mitchell made up his mind on the flight to France: He wanted to stay in Cleveland. 

There was no Wi-Fi on the flight, no movies to watch. Nothing for guys to do but sit around the plane and talk. Mitchell sat with his teammates, drank wine and laughed for six hours. He realized he had everything he needed in Cleveland. He signed a three-year, $150 million extension when free agency opened that will keep him tied to Cleveland through the 2026-27 season with a player option for the 2027-28 season.

Scoop City Newsletter

Advertisement

Free, daily NFL updates direct to your inbox.

Free, daily NFL updates direct to your inbox.

Sign Up

Had Mitchell refused to sign the extension, the Cavs would have been forced to trade him last summer. They could have recouped some value, but not nearly as much as what they paid to get him. The picks they owe Utah would just be starting to transfer and Mitchell wouldn’t even be here. The whole thing could’ve ended badly. Instead, as the Jazz continue to sputter around the bottom of the standings, the Cavs are the clear winners of the trade today. 

The Browns, meanwhile, insisted they did the background work on Watson before trading for him and were comfortable with what they found. Less than three months after the deal, The New York Times reported that Watson met with at least 66 women for massages over 17 months. 

The Browns had already signed him to a $230 million, fully guaranteed contract by that point and were beholden to him. They could never get in front of the scandals even before his play on the field began deteriorating.

The New York Times report was followed by an HBO special. Watson settled most of the cases against him while continuing to insist he did nothing wrong. Arbitrator Sue L. Robinson, a retired federal judge, ruled the NFL carried its burden to prove Watson, by a preponderance of the evidence, engaged in sexual assault as defined by the NFL. She even made note of Watson’s lack of remorse. It was a slow drip of information that never seemed to stop.

Even this year, another woman emerged claiming Watson forced her to have sex with him. That case also was settled out of court.

Nevertheless, the Browns continued to bend to Watson’s will. He grumbled about scripted plays. He made clear he wasn’t comfortable playing under center and preferred shotgun. And when Joe Flacco thrived in the same Kevin Stefanski system that Watson at times struggled to grasp, the Browns fired offensive coordinator Alex Van Pelt and broke an offense that didn’t need fixing. They overhauled the offensive staff and rebuilt their scheme to fit a quarterback who could no longer play at an elite level. 

The Browns will pay for their mistake for at least the next few years. While Watson has two years left on his contract, the Browns still must account for more than $170 million on their cap sheet. As of now, those numbers are stretched over the next three years. If they continue to restructure his deal and spread out the money, the Watson stain could linger even longer. Regardless of their exit strategy, it will include a fair amount of pain. 

Watson will likely be on the 53-man roster next year, but he won’t be on the field. One way or another, the Browns will yet again have a new starting quarterback.

Cleveland was the first team Watson eliminated. Of the four finalists willing to overlook his scandals and bring him in anyway, Watson was least interested in the Browns. But team executives never stopped pursuing him.

They ultimately got their wish. It has turned into a nightmare.

(Image: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos, from left, via Getty Images: Nick Cammett / Diamond Images; Brian Babineau / NBAE)