Ohio State Survived More Tough Tests Than Any Other Champion
By holding off Notre Dame in Monday's national title game, the 2024 Buckeyes cemented their place in history.
It wasn’t quite as easy as it seemed like it might be when Ohio State led Notre Dame 31-7 midway through the third quarter of Monday night’s College Football Playoff championship. But with the help of a doinked Irish field goal and a gutsy 56-yard Will Howard pass to Jeremiah Smith on a 3rd-and-11 late in the game, the Buckeyes weathered a Notre Dame comeback bid to secure their first national title since 2014 — and the first national title of college football’s 12-team playoff era.
This Ohio State team was certainly not short on talent, from Howard and Smith to the rest of a roster littered with future NFL prospects. According to the roster composite ratings at CollegeFootballData.com, this was the most stacked team since 2015 not named “Alabama” or “Georgia” — as well as the second-most talented roster to win a championship in the Playoff era,1 trailing only UGA in 2021.
This Ohio State season was not flawless. In addition to losing to Oregon on the road in mid-October (which feels like an eternity ago, given how long this college football season dragged on), the Buckeyes inexplicably fell to their mortal rivals, the Michigan Wolverines, in the annual clash to end the regular season — a loss that, in previous years, would have knocked OSU out of the four-team playoff chase. Instead, they were given new life, and all that talent won out in the end.
The loss to Michigan will probably keep the 2024 Buckeyes from being on any list of historically remarkable champs. Their SRS score after beating Notre Dame, which I estimate at +25.2,2 ranks fifth-best among the 11 champions of the College Football Playoff era, just ahead of last year’s Michigan squad (which is probably all that matters in Columbus, to be honest):
One area where this Ohio State team has all-time college football history on its side, however, is in the sheer number of teams it beat — especially good teams.
As I mentioned the other day, the 2024 Buckeyes and Fighting Irish both ended up playing 16 games, tied for the most by any FBS team since 1899. That’s a consequence of the expanded playoff, which added two more rounds to the bracket — both of which OSU had to prevail in to reach the Final Four structure from the old system.
And along the way, Ohio State also beat six different teams who had a pregame Elo rating of at least 1850 — the quality that roughly represents a playoff-caliber squad. (12 teams this season had an Elo of 1850 or higher, for context’s sake.) That’s the most 1850+ Elo opponents that any team had to beat in a single FBS season since 1950:
As much as the star-studded $20 million roster, this will be the legacy of Ohio State’s 2024 championship run: They survived the first big gauntlet of college football’s new playoff era. Each subsequent champion may join them on the list above, by definition, since you need to beat more good teams to get to the top than before. But that’s also the point. The new 12-team playoff is all about surviving and advancing on the field, rather than in polls, computer ratings or the committee room. And these Buckeyes did that to a greater degree than any team we’ve seen before in big-time college football.
Filed under: College Football, Football
Aside from 2014, when data is missing.
Sports-Reference/CFB hadn’t officially updated at pub time.