We knew the day would have a different feel, but midway through the long New Orleans night a familiar chord was struck. The No. 4 seed was leading — and outplaying by some distance — the No. 1 seed, and those wearing crimson (as opposed to scarlet) had fallen almost silent and the neutrals in the Superdome were getting behind the massive underdog, and you thought …
This wasn’t a New Year’s feeling.
This was a March/April feeling.
This was what the NCAA tournament promises and delivers every spring. This was how it felt when Arizona and Mike Bibby ousted Kansas and Jacques Vaughn in Birmingham in the Sweet 16 in 1997; when Villanova made 78.6 percent of its shots to beat Georgetown by two points in Rupp Arena in 1985, and most famously when Lorenzo Charles slammed home Dereck Whittenburg’s air ball to send Jim Valvano into his rapturous sprint in Albuquerque in 1983.
This wasn’t an upset on the order of Mercer over Duke or Bucknell over Kansas. The College Football Playoff won’t give us David/Goliath. This was one big-name program (Ohio State) rising up to smite another big name (Alabama) when almost nobody gave the former a snowball’s chance in Satan’s — not to be confused with Saban’s — fiery furnace.
ESPN polled 43 of its analysts, and only one — take a bow, Austin Ward — picked the Buckeyes. One of 43 is 2.3 percent. But what we witnessed on New Year’s night was the longstanding beauty of the Big Dance transplanted into the just-born Playoff: Anything can happen. Any 9-point ’dog can have its night.
The BCS never gave us an upset on the order of Ohio State over Alabama for the simple reason that the BCS never had a No. 4 seed. It was 1-versus-2, one-game-and-done. Ohio State over Miami in January 2003 and Texas over USC in 2006 were shockers more because of perception than reality. Both upsetters, it must be noted, arrived undefeated.
Another thing the nascent College Football Playoff has proved: A great coach can move mountains. What Mike Krzyzewski did for Duke against unbeaten UNLV in Indianapolis in 1991, Urban Meyer did for Ohio State in the Superdome. He made his team believe, and Ohio State believed so deeply it wound up winning on merit. Maybe Alabama would have won a best-of-seven against these Buckeyes, but this wasn’t a series. This was one game, one shot. This was — cue the CBS song — One Shining Moment.
Even as we say that Meyer coached the game of his life, we must note that Thursday’s victory barely shaded what his Florida team did to Ohio State in the desert in January 2007. Georgia fans can’t abide Meyer, and even Florida fans aren’t sure what to make of him now, but this much is clear: If humankind had to play one football game for the fate of the world, he’s the man we’d want coaching it.
It wasn’t just that he beat Saban and Alabama with his No. 3 quarterback; it was that he convinced his players that they could beat Saban and Alabama with a No. 3 quarterback. On Wednesday, he spoke of how important the run-up to kickoff was: “We put great value in what we call working the game. The physical part is done; the mental part is something we place a tremendous value on. We work the body (in practice). We always say you work the game until the foot hits the ball at 8 o’clock on Jan. 1.”
Not for nothing did Meyer major in psychology at Cincinnati, and he was handed a lever Thursday afternoon. “The tide turned a little bit when Wisconsin beat Auburn (in the Outback Bowl),” he said. “Everybody on our team knew that. I made sure they knew that. And when Michigan State came back and beat an excellent Baylor team, it was like, ‘Maybe the Big Ten’s not that bad.’”
Then this: “The mind is a fragile thing. All of a sudden you get down (21-6) against a team that’s No. 1 in recruiting every year for the past six, seven years. … You see them on film. Great team. But we’re pretty good, too. And to go to East Lansing and beat a team that beat Baylor and to play the way we did against Wisconsin, a team that just beat Auburn — that’s the psychological approach to getting 20-year-olds to believe. … There’s no doubt that when we saw Wisconsin beat Auburn, that was a major, major moment for us.”
Credit Meyer’s coordinators — Tom Herman for the offense, Luke Fickell for the defense — with outsmarting Bama’s Kirby Smart and Lane Kiffin. Note also that Meyer nearly pulled a Mike Smith by having Cardale Jones throw a deep incomplete pass that saved Alabama 40 seconds. (“I just kept thinking I screwed this thing up,” he said afterward.) But his team bailed him out and won what a man with two BCS titles called “one of the great team wins we’ve ever been part of.”
But, this being a playoff, the job wasn’t finished. Someone mentioned that Oregon had beaten Florida State by nearly 40 points. “I’ve got to go,” Meyer said, half-rising from his chair. “We’ve got to get ready for that one.”
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