In 2015 Dear Sports Fan will be previewing the biggest sporting event of the year in each of the 50 states in the United States plus the district of Columbia. Follow along with us on our interactive 2015 map.
Texas — The College Football Playoff Championship Game
College Football — January 12, 2015 — Oregon Ducks vs. Ohio State Buckeyes, 8:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.
For the first time ever, college football is using a playoff system to determine the best team in the country. In the past, the national championship was decided by vote (until 1998) or by the result of a single game with its two competitors decided by a mixture of computer and human ranking systems. This year, there was a selection committee made up of thirteen people including some former college coaches, players, athletic directors, as well as a journalist and Condoleezza Rice. These thirteen people chose four teams to play in two semi-final games on New Year’s Day. The winners of those games, Oregon and Ohio State, get to play tonight in the College Football Playoff Championship game. The national championship game is always a big deal but this year it seems even bigger. Having a playoff may or may not be a more fair way of deciding the best team in the country but it absolutely makes it a more compelling sporting event. One of the main problems with the way college football was done in the past was that by the time the national championship game came around, the two teams playing hadn’t played competitively for over a month. That was bad for them and bad for viewers. This way, the teams just played the week before last. They should be at the top of their game and they’re fresh in spectators’ minds.
What’s the plot?
This is Coke vs. Pepsi. Ohio State and Oregon are both big time college football programs. Ohio State has a longer history than Oregon, so they will be playing the role of Coke. Oregon sometimes gets cast as the happy-go-lucky, quirky Pacific Northwest team but actually, they’re the prototypical nouveau riche of college football. The Oregon football program is basically a branch of Nike. Nike co-founder Phil Knight is an alumnus of Oregon, where he ran on the track & field team. As a proud alum but also in what has probably been a smart business decision, he’s donated a lot of money to Oregon athletics. Wikipedia cites figures well above $100 million! The Oregon Ducks football team is famous for their fast-paced style of play and their many, many uniforms. It seems like every game, the team comes out with a brand new style of uniform and all of them make the team seem like the fastest one out there. Or wait, maybe that’s just because they are great athletes. Oregon is Pepsi — a little less traditional, a little quirky, but materially the same as Coke.
Part of the plot, or at least the fun, of this game is how it’s going to be produced on ESPN. ESPN is rallying all of its channels to provide different choices of how to consume the game. If you just feel like watching the football game, you can see it on ESPN in English or ESPN Deportes in Spanish. If you want to watch the game but get different commentary, you have three main options: ESPN2 will be doing a “Film Room” take on the game with a bunch of coaches breaking down the tactics, ESPNU will have a group of random ESPN personalities blabbing about the game as they watch it together, and ESPN News will be showing the game with a group of ESPN analysts talking. On ESPN3, the online streaming service, you can get the game synched up with either the Ohio State radio announcers or the Oregon radio announcers, or you can watch the whole thing from that cool “Spider Cam” that roams over the field, suspended by wires. My favorite option is the “Sounds of the Game” option on ESPN Classic that shows the game without any commentators at all! How cool will it be to just hear sounds from the stadium itself?
Regardless of which team wins this game, it will be a fairy tale ending for the winning team’s quarterback. If Oregon wins, their quarterback Marcus Mariota will be like the cowboy wearing the white hat, riding off into the sunset after vanquishing all his enemies. If Ohio State wins, their quarterback, Cardale Jones, will be a true Cinderella story. The third quarterback on his own team, winning this game would indelibly leave a mark on college football history. Let’s find out more about the characters.
Who are the characters?
Cardale Jones — Quarterback is by far the most important single position in football. Great quarterbacks are extremely rare and even functional ones are difficult to find. Teams that lose their starting quarterback to a long term injury very rarely have an acceptable backup who can maintain the level of play at a high enough level for the team to succeed. Teams that lose their first and second string quarterback are almost always dead in the water. We’re seeing that now in the NFL with the Arizona Cardinals whose play has declined dramatically as they descended from Carson Palmer to Drew Stanton to Ryan Lindley. Ohio State has been through the exact same series of injuries this year but each time they lose a quarterback, a new one steps in and the team doesn’t miss a beat. Cardale Jones is the third quarterback up for Ohio State and in his first game as a starter, he led the Ohio State team to a 59-0 win over Wisconsin in the Big Ten Championship game. He followed that up with an unbelievable performance in the team’s semi-final win over Alabama. Jones has an almost stereotypically hard-luck back-story and I certainly hope that he beats the odds to play well in this game.
Marcus Mariota — As long as Mariota can get through this game without shredding his knees, he will be the first pick of next year’s NFL draft. He’s the prototypical modern quarterback. He’s tall (6’4″), fast (sub 4.5 seconds for the 40 yard dash, which is faster than you can imagine), and a good decision maker. If we were better than terrible at identifying good NFL quarterbacks, Mariota would be a sure thing. He’s also a senior, playing his third year for the Oregon Ducks (he sat out his freshman year.) When he won the Heisman trophy this year, he became the first Hawaiian born player to ever get that honor given to the best college football player each year. If he can win this game, he’ll leave college on top of his sport.
Mark Helfrich — Who? Right, that’s the point. Even sports fans don’t know who Mark Helfrich is. He’s the head coach of the Oregon Ducks. Reading this excellent article about him by Michael Weinreb in Grantland makes me feel like maybe there are some college football coaches out there who care about more than just winning and getting paid. Here’s a few tidbits about Helfrich. He grew up in Oregon and loved the Ducks as a kid, even when they were terrible. He played college quarterback for Southern Oregon and later as a pro in Austria during the NFL’s flirtation with developing a minor league in Europe. Instead of screaming and yelling, like many coaches do during the game, he is “thorough and utterly prepared and calm on the sideline, an intellectual at heart who happens to be a football coach.”
Who’s going to win?
Oregon is favored by six points. That may seem like a lot but the over/under (you can bet on whether the combined total of both teams’ scoring is over or under a number set by Vegas) is 74, so six points is only eight percent of the expected scoring. The odds suggest a close, high-scoring game, but I always think that college kids (and they are really kids, after all) tend to get a little more nervous than we expect in the biggest games. My guess is that it takes a little while for the offenses to settle down. That might be enough to give Ohio State a chance to keep up with Oregon and squeak by them for victory in a relatively low scoring game.