Mandel’s Final Thoughts: Don’t blame Playoff committee for first round getting out of hand

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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)