Andy

The rumor was that ND picked Riley Leonard over Will Howard (who isn't elite either but did a good imitation of it last night) when transfer hunting last year, so there's probably some scouting there. (Note - I will love Riley Leonard forever and he was pretty good last night, so this is not shade on him.) The previous OC was horrific at QB evaluation. For all his skills as a HC, Brian Kelly sucked at developing QBs unless they were low-ceiling guys. Supposedly CJ Carr (the presumptive 2025 starter) has the skills to be great, so maybe he'll be the difference, though I've heard that line before.

You had to go wake them up. 😛 At least they didn't wither and die, I guess. Will still be the highest poll finish for the team since 1993 (I assume they'll be no lower than #3). Get a better quarterback (Riley Leonard will be fondly remembered forever but you aren't winning titles with guys like that unless you have Ohio State level dudes everywhere else), keep raising the talent floor, keep knocking at the door and maybe the next time you won't have to play a backup defensive line with your best offensive player visibly unhealthy and the other team won't have 3 first-round picks at WR.

Ohio State is the most talented team in the country and it was always a matter of if they felt like playing like it. Notre Dame's 2 most important position group (the lines) were both crushed by injury all year and OSU is the first team good enough to take advantage. Football isn't complicated.

It really is hilarious. Spending is literally the only advantage available to the Cubs and they have just chosen to opt out of it

There would have to be some serious negotiating to get to that point. When the owners proposed a cap and floor during the 2022 lockout, the numbers were flat-out insulting and would've resulted in a serious drop in player compensation. The owners are going to have to open their books the way other sports' owners do if they want a cap.

I told a friend of mine yesterday it's a good thing MLB does have a stupid playoff system because otherwise the Dodgers would win titles forever. If LA's goal is to get everyone outside SoCal to push for a salary cap, they're on their way.

Good catch on the 4 + 1 rule; I had forgotten about that. So I think we can expect a new City Connect at some point. The original idea of the CC's was 3-year cycles and the Cubs were already on year 4 with the Wrigleyville uniform. (I never much cared for the uniform but the cap started to grow on me after a while.)

It's pretty much a semantics game. Apparently the difference is that Nike designs the City Connect; the Cubs themselves came up with this one. But as they are replacing the Wrigleyville uniforms and are even being worn the same days (Friday home games) as those were, they're functionally a City Connect uniform.

Yeah, I think it's a reflection of Tomlin getting all he can from the team in the regular season. They don't have another gear.

Yeah I don't feel comfortable with either side of it. My heart says that Al Golden is the best DC in the country and if Texas can reasonably slow OSU's offense down, so can he. But ND is basically on its backup OL and DL and its best offensive player is playing at 60% or so. There are a lot more paths to victory for the Buckeyes than for ND.

There's something particularly delicious after the last 30 years of mostly misery that Notre Dame is the first team in college football history to win two major bowl games in one season (I know it was never possible before) Playing with pretty much a backup offensive line and one remaining starter on the defensive line and they beat Georgia and Penn State back to back, holy hell.

Pretty much every possible complaint about this format can be solved by getting rid of the pointless conference championship games, which in case anyone needed a refresher were invented pretty much from nowhere by SEC commissioner Roy Kramer 30-odd years ago to make TV money. There was never a competitive reason for them to exist. Getting rid of them enables the calendar to move up so the first round of the playoff can be the current CCG weekend (or the current Army-Navy weekend) and the second can be the one the first round was. That enables you to move both those rounds to campus sites and enables students to be on campus for them, which I view as a must. Then the semifinals can be at 2 cool bowl sites (presumably the Rose and Sugar) on New Year's, and the title game can be back where it was in the 4 team era. No need to fight with the NFL for time slots. It also nukes any reason to reserve byes for anybody. No one is playing some made up "extra" game, so you can seed the bracket however you want without worrying about "devaluing" title games. Would it be hard to determine conference champs this way? Sure. But 1) it wouldn't be so difficult if the conferences didn't expand beyond all reason*, and 2) who flipping cares who wins a conference in this sport now except as a means to get to the playoff? You think any Georgia fan will really care years from now that they were 2024 SEC champs when they lost a quarterfinal game? Determine the auto bids by tiebreaker or CFP rankings or whatever you want. The problem is no one in any of the conferences has any incentive to do this, so we'll keep those games and whatever the next format is will be clunkier than this one because of it. * Also, if the B1G and SEC didn't decide to mutilate other conferences for money right after this format was proposed, the byes would probably have been Oregon, Ohio State, Georgia and Texas and no one would've batted an eye.

It's kinda fitting considering certain circles of the college football Internet have included the two fan bases arguing with each other over who should be ranked higher for much of the season. I guess we'll find out who was right.

Tonight was the first time sports has made me cry since the World Series and damn I missed it.

According to Mustache Man, Ohio State is 2 point underdogs against Texas. I'm rarely at a loss for understanding a line, but I'm bewildered by that. ETA - now he's showing Ohio State -6. I don't know what I saw before.

I think that was clearly a "we don't want to make that call at this point in the game" decision. Anything short of the dirtiest possible hit was gonna get overlooked there.

Whoever wins is already looking at a 2 day rest disadvantage against Penn State, and the next game is a week from tomorrow. With the obvious caveat that public safety comes first, they should clearly be trying to play the game as soon as they can to not exacerbate the issues those teams are already facing.

Every stupid pro SEC narrative has been crushed to pieces with its champion against Notre Dame the last team to play. Feels like a trap.

I've never hated a signing more and been proven so correct. The Cubs had just gone through 2 postseason runs in which they rode their closer like a rented mule and then they signed this guy and said right off the top that he'd never pitch back-to-back days because they were scared of him getting hurt. And then he got hurt anyway 2 months into a 2-year contract, and before July was out he'd thrown his last pitch in the major leagues. What a stupid decision that was.

I think the Cubs' computers know all this too, and that's why they were perfectly fine trading away Paredes.

With Beck they probably would be. It actually opened as a pick 'em. As much as people will talk about the Beck factor, Notre Dame is looking like they're going to have 2 of the 9 preseason starters along the two lines available for this game because injuries have taken out all the rest of them. That seems like a lot to overcome for a team so dependent on defense and running the ball.

I badly want Texas to yak it up against Clemson so we can ask why a team that beat zero ranked opponents and only one team that seems to be clearly at least good (A&M) was in. But somehow that wouldn't be the discussion even if that happened.

This was a stupid discussion when Notre Dame was on the other end of it and it's stupid now. Indiana was in because Alabama lost to TWO crappy teams (Oklahoma and Vanderbilt) and didn't have enough good wins to make up for it. If they had lost to only one crappy team and to Tennessee, then they're in and no one really bats an eye. But they lost to two. If Ole Miss had just beaten a Kentucky team that literally beat no other power-conference team all year - and got utterly trucked by the same Louisville team that SMU beat - then they're in and no one really bats an eye. But they didn't. If South Carolina had beaten any of the 3 teams they lost to, then maybe they're in. (This is probably the one team I feel bad for, because the refs arguably screwed them out of the LSU game.) But they didn't. If we're going to ban every team that ever takes a lopsided playoff L from the playoff, we're going to be running out of teams very quickly.

If you're going to have a several-rounds-long playoff that starts after Thanksgiving and ends in January, there is essentially no way to do it without going head to head with the NFL at some point. The semifinals, taking place in the Cotton and Orange bowls, were placed on a Thursday and Friday, Jan. 9-10, in order to avoid the NFL, which should make for some interesting attendance situations.

Technically there is nothing stopping that if the players and coaches both agree. In the Penn State player's case, it seems as though he had to leave in order to go on visits and pick his next school. And as Derwood points out, there's an academic calendar in play as well.