Sunday Superlatives: The best, and everything in-between, in coaching from two magnificent College Football Playoff games
Sure, the calendar changed today, but after the greatest day in College Football Playoff history, we’re bringing back the Sunday Superlatives one last time for the 2022 season.
What a New Year’s Eve day of football full of drama, brilliance, controversy, exhilaration and pain. It was pulse-pounding stuff, with four different fan bases all experiencing every gamut of emotions.
Here’s everything in coaching from two magnificent CFP Semifinals.
THE SMARTEST CALL OF THE WEEK AWARD
On an epic day with so many twists and turns, it’s hard to single out “the smartest call of the week,” but here’s a hunch that Bubba ’n Earl probably think it was Kirby Smart’s game-saving, gut decision to call timeout mere seconds before Ohio State ran a successful fake punt in the fourth quarter of the Peach Bowl.
With around nine minutes left in the game, Georgia trailed OSU by 11 and had just stopped quarterback CJ Stroud a yard away from a first down at the Buckeyes’ 34-yard-line.
Ryan Day sent in the punt team, but Ohio State sprinted to the line out of a sugar huddle, shifted to an overloaded formation and snapped the ball to backup tight end Mitch Rossi, who ran to the left for a first down.
Or so he thought.
With Georgia’s coaches screaming in Smart’s headset, “FAKE, FAKE, FAKE,” the reigning national champion head coach sprinted down the sideline and called timeout, with an official blowing the whistle a second before OSU ran the play.
That one second, Smart’s split decision, changed the entire dynamics of the rest of the game.
“A lot of teams carry it, and you try to practice it, but it’s another thing when they actually do it and execute it,” Smart said of Ohio State’s formation.
“It was one of those gut reactions that I didn’t think that we had it lined up properly to stop it, so we called timeout.”
It’s not hyperbole to say that the timeout saved Georgia’s perfect season. The Bulldogs, which had been burned by three successful fake punts this year, went on to outscore the Buckeyes 15-3 for the biggest fourth-quarter comeback in CFP history.
“I didn’t want to burn the timeout because once you burn the timeout, you can’t get the ball back,” Smart told ESPN. “If you don’t have three timeouts, you can’t get the ball back. We’ve had three fakes on us this year. Everybody is faking. It’s nothing we’re doing wrong, we just started saying we’re going to call timeout if we think it’s a fake.”
Sometimes, the name fits.
Exactly one play after the negated fake punt, Stetson Bennett found Arian Smith wide-open for a 76-yard touchdown. At the stroke of midnight, Ohio State missed a game-winning field goal to send Georgia back to the national title game.
The Bulldogs did so many things wrong in Atlanta on Saturday night. Their secondary was torched. Their defensive line couldn’t get Stroud on the ground. Bennett ran hot, then cold, then hot again. They missed multiple field goals. The list goes on.
But the reigning champs managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat because they embodied Kirby Smart’s favorite phrase — as he himself and his army of support staffers who helped alert him to the fake also exhibited in that moment to call timeout.
“Composure. Composure. Composure.”
Smart was out-coached by Day for much of the night. And Georgia was outplayed. They won the game though because they never panicked — not when they were down 14 in the first half or 11 in the fourth quarter — and that championship mettle proved to be the difference.
“I’m so proud of these guys,” Smart said. “They never say quit. They never say die. They were like a sniper tonight. They came out shooting and they never quit shooting.”
THE CINDERELLA SLIPPER STILL FITS CUP
The TCU Horned Frogs — 5-7 a year ago, picked to finish seventh in the Big 12 by preseason prognosticators and close to 200:1 odds to make the CFP — are 60 minutes away from their first national title in 84 years after recording the biggest upset in CFP history.
What a story.
Sonny Dykes has had the Hypnotoad magic all year, but it didn’t take any voodoo for his team to beat Michigan in the wildest Fiesta Bowl.
The Horned Frogs, as they sing after every victory, just “gave ‘em hell.”
In a breathtakingly-seesaw affair, the Horned Frogs won a thrilling shootout because every time the Wolverines would throw a punch, TCU would land a haymaker. TCU led wire-to-wire, surviving a crazy game that featured six turnovers and all sorts of explosive touchdowns (four 30-yard scores) because it was the more physical football team.
For four quarters, “little ole TCU” took it to Michigan. The Horned Frogs were motivated by a month of hearing that the Wolverines — the Big Bad Bullies from the Big Ten who won the Joe Moore Award two straight years — would “run through them.”
Dykes initially downplayed the disrespect, but TCU’s players certainly didn’t, and even the head coach enjoyed basking in how the Horned Frogs pulled off their latest stunner in a storybook season.
“We said it a million times, but, look, we were picked seventh in the preseason poll in the Big 12, so at some point, you kind of just quit listening to what everybody says, and it doesn’t really affect you,” Dykes said.
“We were the most physical team on the field tonight, and I think that was easy to see.”
Yup.
TCU linebacker Dee Winters played the game of his life (7 tackles, 3 TFLs and an INT for a touchdown) but it was the Horned Frogs’ entire defense that played like they actually could shoot blood from their eyes.
They allowed a lot of big passing plays, but they had 13 tackles for loss, a pair of pick-sixes and two red zone stops inside the 2-yard line. After the game’s opening play, they held down Michigan’s rushing attack the rest of the afternoon, limiting the UM to a rushing success rate of just 36%.
TCU’s Cinderella story goes to Los Angeles now to play No. 1 Georgia, and while the Horned Frogs’ slipper still fits, that glass has all sorts of ‘chips on it.
“That’s who we are,” Dykes said.
“I think we all have a chip on our shoulder. It’s part of the Horned Frog way. … We’re going to play again in 10 days, and we’re going to hear the same crap for 10 days that we heard leading up to this ballgame.
“We got to do what we did this game. We’ve got to answer that criticism and show up and do what we’re supposed to do.”
Michigan certainly learned that lesson the hard way. We’ll find out soon enough if Georgia will, too.
THE CRITICS CAN SHUT UP NOW AWARD
The Buckeyes enter the offseason with plenty of ‘what-ifs,’ but the quality of their head coach certainly isn’t among them.
Ryan Day (unfairly) faced more pressure than any of the four coaches in the CFB, but as ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit said, “After 35 days of scrutiny … Ohio State showed up as an angry football team tonight.”
Starting with their head coach.
Day preached all month that OSU would “come out swinging,” and they did. The narrative that OSU was “soft” was dismissed from the opening quarter. That it wasn’t quite enough doesn’t negate the fact that Day had the Buckeyes well-prepared. Or that he called a brilliantly aggressive game.
“I don’t think there’s one guy in that locker room that doesn’t feel like we shouldn’t have won the game,” Day said, dismissing any notion of moral victories postgame.
“Again, that’s a part of this thing that is going to sit in our stomachs for a long time.”
But it’s clear his team responded to the constant criticism surrounding their head coach.
Sure, Ryan Day still needs to shore up OSU’s defense. He probably wants to avoid losing to Michigan for a third year in a row in 2023. You can even nitpick his game management on the final drive. But those questioning — looking mainly at you, Buckeyes Nation — whether he is among the sport’s top coaches was answered emphatically on Saturday night.
“Coach Day did a helluva job, man,” Stroud said.
“His leadership, even though people would talk and talk and do this and do that, he just keeps showing up. When you see a man like that, that’s a true man, a man in the arena. Really everybody on our team, we didn’t splinter. We didn’t turn eye to eye or point fingers when we lost. We owned our mistakes and kept swinging, like our culture. I wouldn’t want to play for anybody else, with anybody else.
“Coach Day, helluva coach.”
THANK YOU FOR YOUR HONESTY AWARD
“The winner was football.”
Jim Harbaugh has a particular way with words, but his summation of the Fiesta Bowl was perfect.
Michigan was in the midst of a season of destiny, yet the fairy tale ending didn’t come, as TCU played spoiler and ruined what was supposed to be a coronation of what Harbaugh deemed “a new beginning” in a CFP loss just a year ago.
While Michigan did a lot of beating Michigan against TCU (the trick play on the goal line was terrible, the two bad interceptions were huge swings) and there will be plenty of time this offseason to dissect what it means for Harbaugh & Co., moving forward.
The Wolverines lost, just like the Buckeyes, but we — fans of college football, whether you cover it or watch it — were winners Saturday night. And the same would’ve been true if either outcome were reversed.
Both playoff Semifinals were unforgettable. It’s what the sport always envision when it created the format a decade ago.
We got eight hours of mesmerizing entertainment, with more drama, heartbreak and plot twists than your favorite Mike White production.
That’ll more than do.
THE BOUNCED CASH THAT CHECK COORDINATOR OF THE WEEK AWARD
“Every play we didn’t make has to be analyzed by me and (I’ve) got to think not just the call but who is in what position. It’s not the players’ fault, it’s me, and I have to get them in the best position.”
— Ohio State defensive coordinator Jim Knowles
The Buckeyes ultimately lost the Peach Bowl because their defense once again couldn’t get an important stop in the fourth quarter. Or really any period except the third quarter (just 24 total yards allowed).
Knowles, OSU’s first-year DC, dialed up some nice schematic packages on third downs (UGA was just 2 of 10), but otherwise, he was out-foxed by UGA OC Todd Monken for much of the night.
Ohio State allowed more than 500 yards, with Georgia averaging nearly a first down (9.0) per play. The Bulldogs had 10 different players record a rush or reception over 15 yards. They had 17 explosive plays on the night (including 10 over 20 yards).
The Buckeyes were better on defense in 2022, but some five plays proved to be difference in OSU’s loss to Michigan, and the unit’s big-play bugaboo doomed them once again. Ohio State is too talented — with too many 4-and 5-star prospects — to constantly get beat deep or have so many poor run fits.
To his credit, Knowles, who makes close to $2 million as the highest-paid DC in the country, accepted full responsibility for OSU’s defensive shortcomings.
“Bottom line, it comes down to execution, and we didn’t get it done in the fourth quarter defensively,” Knowles said, per Eleven Warriors.
“And it’s up to me now to spend a lot of dark nights figuring out (why that happened). It’s not the players, it’s on me to put them in the right positions, and when you don’t get it done, you can always look at it and look at a call here or there and say, ‘Boy, I wish I was in a different call.’