When last a championship pairing didn’t include an SEC team, Matt Ryan was a Boston College junior, Al Horford was a Florida sophomore and Nick Saban was coaching the Miami Dolphins. The date — Texas versus USC in the Rose Bowl, greatest game ever — was Jan. 4, 2006. Nine years and eight days later, Oregon and Ohio State will play for a national title that, for the first time in a while, feels national.
From the 2006 season through 2012, the only way the SEC champ didn’t become the national champ was if it met another SEC team. (Alabama over LSU in January 2012.) A year ago, a team from somewhere else ended the seven-year run, but the team was Florida State, the most SEC-like program not in the SEC.
The inaugural installment of the College Football Playoff will conclude without the SEC being represented in Monday’s final here, but this playoff wouldn’t exist without the SEC — or, more precisely, without every other big league getting sick of the SEC. The sight of Alabama, which hadn’t played for its conference championship, facing LSU for the BCS title drove the other conferences crazy, and even the Big Ten and Pac-12, which had long resisted a tournament because of their fealty to the Rose Bowl, said, “Enough is enough.”
Beyond anger, there was grudging respect. Nobody was apt to beat the SEC in a championship game — you’ll recall Notre Dame losing to Alabama 42-14 in January 2013 — until it could play as SEC teams play. That Florida State finally did the deed was no shock: The Seminoles were laden with big receivers and quick defensive linemen, and even then it took all they had to overtake an Auburn team one year removed from 3-9. But that game showed that, at least at the top, the gap was closing.
Ohio State’s victory over Alabama in the Sugar Bowl semi showed that the gap was gone. The Buckeyes gained 537 yards against a Saban/Kirby Smart defense.They were just as fast, just as strong and even deeper — Cardale Jones, Ohio State’s No. 3 quarterback, outplayed Blake Sims, Alabama’s No. 1 — than the team that reaps the nation’s highest-ranked recruiting class every blessed year.
It was no accident that these Buckeyes were coached by Urban Meyer, who introduced the world to the reality of SEC Speed in Florida’s upset of No. 1 Ohio State in January 2007. Meyer had made the Gators what he called “the fastest team in the country,” and once Ted Ginn Jr. was lost after the opening kickoff — he returned it for a touchdown – the Buckeyes were utterly ponderous. The indelible memory of that night in the desert was Derrick Harvey, the Florida defensive end, running down Ohio State quarterback Troy Smith, the Heisman winner.
Ohio State entered last week’s game 0-10 against SEC opposition in postseason games. (A Sugar Bowl victory over Arkansas in January 2011 was forfeited.) Although Meyer won his first 24 games as Buckeyes coach, the loss to Michigan State for the 2013 Big Ten title and the Orange Bowl beating by Clemson — Sammy Watkins caught 16 passes for 227 yards — showed that his team in Year 2 wasn’t quite up to speed, as it were. In Year 3 it was.
Behind a third-stringer, the Buckeyes beat Bama on merit. They made the difference-making plays: Michael Thomas’ outrageous foot drag at the end of the first half, Ezekiel Elliott’s runaway touchdown near the end of the second, Evan Spencer’s high-rise snag of an Alabama onside kick. There was no gap in anything that night in the Superdome — not in talent, not in speed, not in coaching.
In the Rose Bowl, it had been the same but more. Oregon was too swift and unrelenting for Florida State, a hugely gifted team in (we say again) the SEC mold that simply surrendered.
On the playoff’s maiden voyage, we’ve already seen that there’s championship football being played all across these United States. For nearly a decade, only the Deep South could claim as much. For college football as a national entity, as opposed to a regional one, this couldn’t have worked out better. (Just don’t say that too loud around the folks from the SEC Network.)
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