Mandel’s final thoughts: The CFP’s first round got out of hand, but don’t blame the committee

And now, 12 final thoughts from the first weekend of the first-ever 12-team playoff.

1. The first College Football Playoff game on campus started at 8:10 PM ET in front of 77,622 roaring fans at Notre Dame Stadium. You didn’t have to be in 25-degree South Bend weather to get chills. Anyone who watches television can understand the magnitude of this moment for a sport that has only ever played its postseason in bowl games and neutral sites.

The honeymoon lasted about 40 minutes until Indiana trailed Notre Dame 14-0 and the first wave of complaints began. The wrong team(s) entered. The fights were boring. Twelve teams were too many. Or too few.

Twenty-seven hours later, Ohio State pulled off the fourth home blowout of the first round, an anticlimactic end to such an expected weekend. Perhaps the committee did a poor job. Maybe it was the weather. Or … maybe Notre Dame, Penn State, Texas and Ohio State are really good teams.

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2. The eighth-seeded Buckeyes were the biggest wild cards entering the weekend. Who knew where their heads would be three weeks away 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 worries went out the window by 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 what it wanted, starting with quarterback Will Howard’s best performance of the season: 24 of 29 for 311 yards, two touchdowns and an 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 didn’t at all against Michigan. But this version can win a national championship.

3. How would you like to be no. 1 from Oregon when you watch that game? The Ducks went undefeated, including beating Ohio State at home in a classic — and now they’re going to play those guys again in the quarterfinals? While Penn State gets Boise State? It seems like a mistake.

But it’s going to make for a great 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 have been more consistent all season and they will be well rested. But remember, Ohio State was on the verge of winning their first meeting before that offensive pass-interference call on Smith. And Howard will be out for revenge after his last-second clock foul cost the Buckeyes their final shot.

4. No. 5 seed Texas has been at its best this season when the run game is turned 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 pass for 100 yards. Texas advances to the Peach Bowl, where it will face Big 12 champion Arizona State and is expected to win. The Sun Devils got a lot 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.

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5. Clemson finished with four losses for the second straight season, but quarterback Cade Klubnik gives the Tigers hope for 2025. After trailing 31-10 in the third quarter, Klubnik brought Clemson back within one score despite the Tigers down in 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 drove 77 yards for the dagger touchdown. Dabo Swinney recently signed his first ever defensive player off 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 a relief to the 100,000-plus in Beaver Stadium, even if it meant getting popsicles for four hours. Nittany Lions fans have spent much of the last eight years being let down in big games, but this performance was emphatic. Two pick sixes in the first 17 minutes had the crowd roaring, and it quickly became clear that SMU’s offense had no chance against Kobe King, Abdul Carter, Dominic DeLuca and Dani Dennis-Sutton. Penn State’s own offense was hardly overwhelming (5 yards per play), but it didn’t have to be. Mustangs quarterback Kevin Jennings (20 of 36, 195 yards, one touchdown, three interceptions) struggled mightily 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 will face a next-level challenge in the 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 the second straight week. (It opened as a 10-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) team in their first two games. Top seeds Oregon (vs. No. 6 Ohio State) and Georgia (vs. No. 5 Notre Dame) have tougher quarterfinal draws than Penn State.

It’s a golden opportunity for Franklin’s team in its biggest postseason game since the 2016 Rose Bowl against USC.

8. If you thought squabbles from three weeks ago about the final spots in the bracket would be clouded once the games started… you must be new here. As in the BCS and 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 upset that his 9-3 team didn’t get in (while pretending the home loss to 4-8 Kentucky never happened), took some shots at the committee during both Notre Dame -Indiana and Penn State -SMU game. (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 second-to-last finishes that teams whose seasons had ended would not be reevaluated after the conference championship games. At the time, the story became whether SMU would be “punished” if it lost to Clemson (which it did). Given a truly blank slate, the committee might have given someone like 10-2 BYU another look. As it was, it faced considerable pressure to avoid “knocking out SMU” to play a 13th game. And then the Mustangs lost on a 56-yard field goal. They had to join.

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9. Seed no. 7 Notre Dame finally got its first BCS/CFP win, dominating No. Indiana. 10 (the final score was 27-17, but it was 27-3 with two minutes left) to set up a fascinating Sugar Bowl quarterfinal against the 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 Jeremiah Love’s 98-yard touchdown run Friday), and both have dirty 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-ranked pass defense.

But we can find out just how important those first-round byes can be. While Georgia will have had 24 days of rest on Jan. 1, Notre Dame saw several key players get injured 11 days out. American defensive tackle Rylie Mills went down with a 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.”

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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 were 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,” couldn’t have coached more conservatively as IU ran away from Notre Dame 37 .in the first quarter settled for a field goal from the Irish 16, already down 14-0 and astonishing points down 20-3 in the fourth quarter.

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) failed to multiple open receivers. A disappointing end to the program’s best season in half a century.

11. With the game out of reach in the final minutes, ESPN’s Sean McDonough wasn’t 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. Overall, I agree with them that the committee needs to be more discerning about strength of schedule in this age of 16/17/18 team conferences. Indiana won’t be the last Big Ten or SEC team to win 11 games against empty calories.

But there was no one else worth stepping on the mat for this season instead. The alternates either lacked big wins of their own (Miami), lost to bad teams (Alabama and Ole Miss), or lost to several other teams in the bubble (South Carolina).

It was only a few years ago that people were complaining about the four-team CFP being basically the same teams every year. I personally enjoyed the novelty of watching Indiana in a playoff game. At least until that point.

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12. That’s not to say I don’t have any beefs with the new format. Reserving first-round byes for conference champions was well-intentioned, but it had a profoundly unfair effect on seeding this first year. Seed no. 3 (Boise State) and no. 4 (Arizona State), both champions, are double-digit underdogs in their quarterfinals to Big Ten (Penn State) and SEC (Texas) runners-up. That’s not how a bracket is supposed to work.

And there’s another flaw worth considering now that we’ve experienced our first game on campus: The top four seeds can’t hold their ground. I love a trip to Pasadena myself, but I bet even Oregon fans would trade their Disneyland trip in exchange for Ohio State returning to Autzen Stadium.

But that’s not going to change in the next 10 days.

(Photo: Jason Miller/Getty Images)