I picked Ohio State vs. TCU in my natty, so like most of the country I got it halfway right. Different teams though
Ohio State was able to exploit Georgia's secondary. They are the only team in the country outside of Tennessee or Alabama that has enough skill at QB and WR to keep the pressure on Georgia's offense. Georgia runs a pretty vanilla offensive scheme, but their offensive line and WRs/RBs are so good that it doesn't matter. They can score with anyone in the nation when they're on and they hammered Ohio State's defense.
Harrison being out probably cost Ohio State the game. Kind of like Ewers being out cost Texas versus Alabama. I guess being more physical than your opponent means knocking out essential players increases your odds of winning
. Good for the SEC though, I hope they enjoy another national title.
I'll say this about the SEC though and I've been saying it since about 2013, they pretty much sealed the deal when they married their propaganda outlets (CBS + ESPN) with their well-developed bagmen apparatuses (apparati?). The South produces enough high-end talent to support two "Power 5" conferences, but the cream of the crop in the ACC has been sucked dry and absorbed by the SEC. 15 years ago you would be seeing a lot of these guys going to places like Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Georgia, Tennessee, and Arkansas go to schools like Georgia Tech, NC State, Virginia Tech, Miami, and FSU. The ACC is a shell of what it was in the 2000s sadly. If you lined up every player in the SEC and ACC together and maybe did a 65/35 talent distribution, that's what it looked like back in, say, 2007. Today it is probably closer to 80/20 (80% of the best players in the South end up in the SEC). Makes a huge difference when filling out your roster.
And then on top of that, the two best programs in the SEC have gone national. Alabama and Georgia can recruit California and Texas with no issues at all. It is really creating an unlevel playing field. I know crying about it doesn't do anything to help, but saying "just get better" doesn't solve the structural issue at play here with the sport. Opening the playoff field might help, but the way they are selecting teams probably won't help matters. I would just roll with an 8-team field, top 6-rated conference champs and 2 at-larges. If Texas, Oklahoma, LSU, Tennessee, Florida, etc. want to whine about being the 3rd best at-large team, so what. Same goes for USC or UCLA in the B1G. Maybe they should have stayed as the big fish in the small pond and increased their odds of making it
