This Week in Ohio State Football: Buckeyes to look like Buckeyes again, CFP expansion looms

Vo. 1, No. 36

This week in Ohio State football, we learned the Buckeyes will look like Ohio State again for the first time in 20 years.

That’s the good news!

On the flip side, the 24-team College Football Playoff also seems to grow more inevitable all the time, so it wasn’t all good vibes.

Let’s look at those things and other news items from the second week in May…

The week began with Ohio State announcing at some point this season they are bringing back the garish black uniforms they should never wear.

More notable from that announcement was the inclusion of gray/sliver stripes on the sleeves. Not only had those not been there on past versions of these costumes, they also strongly resembled the stripes on the sleeves of Ohio State jerseys from the 1990s-2005 and most of the time before that going back to the ‘50s.

Was that further confirmation Nike is finally fixing the mistake it made in 2006 when it replace those stripes with simple black and red ones?

Indeed it was, as the university confirmed on Wednesday when it unveiled the regular home and away uniforms for this fall.

So our long national nightmare is finally over after 20 years (!).

Ohio State has decided to chuck the Indiana throwbacks. No longer will they look curiously like Nebraska or even Wisconsin.

The Scarlet and Gray will be themselves again, unmistakably so.

You, a normal person unlike myself, might be asking that, and that’s totally fair.

Maybe you don’t care about this, but I am one of those people who really hated the move to the red and black stripes from the moment it happened.

I know the stated reason was to make the stripes on the shoulders match the pants and the helmet, but that is not the type of thing normal humans care about, either.

Maybe if you were starting from scratch perhaps that is a must, but they weren’t.

As popular OSU YouTuber Juck Miletti points out in this video, the gray sleeve stripes actually predate the silver helmets (and therefore the helmet stripe) so it’s fair to assume some know-thing at Nike just decided to fix something that wasn’t broken for no good reason.

Maybe I’m just nostalgic and a victim of the moment when I was a teenager, but I think it’s more than that.

A sports team’s visual identity is important, especially in college sports when you’ve got uniforms that connect generations. And ESPECIALLY when that team is consistently good and the identity is awesome.

Not everyone can be both authentic and unique. A lot of people/teams fail in pursuing those dual goals these days.

Ohio State had it right there the whole time and just ignored it, but let’s not dwell on it too long.

The wrong has been righted.

Order is restored.

What should Ohio State do about the Schott and the 'Shoe?

These are now called “Buckeye Stripes” (who knew stripes needed their own branding?), and Ohio State put out a nice video with Mike Doss and Andy Katzenmoyer explaining how the stripes “evolved” back to what they were before, which is weird but also makes some sense.

I took it as sort of rhetorically admitting their mistake even though I am relatively certain no one who had any involvement in that decision 20 years ago is still around.

Like I said, maybe you don’t care about the uniforms, but the messaging more or less acknowledges this is something Ohio State knew people cared about — and not just nerds like me I guess.

That doesn’t happen often enough these days, nor do fans actually get what they want.

Speaking of that…

Yahoo Sports has the dastardly details of the relentless push for a 24-team College Football Playoff, which seems like it is certainly going to be thrust upon us in the not-too-distant future.

I came to the realization in January it was going to happen because the Big Ten, in its infinite lack of wisdom and embarrassing deference to Fox, was clearly not going to take no for an answer.

Since then, relatively reliable reporting from multiple sources indicates everyone else but the SEC has decided they like the idea, too, mostly for all the wrong reasons. (More access for teams who don’t deserve it and more money they don’t actually need.)

The only thing that might stop this travesty is a lack of financial backing from the broadcasters, although that did not prevent the similarly horrible decision to expand the NCAA Tournament to 76 teams so I have no expectations it will do the trick this time, either.

These people aren’t reasonable nor particularly smart, which is why they continue to mismanage the sport.

Jim Phillips, the ACC’s feckless commissioner, said this week if qualifying teams are left out then your playoff is too small.

He was talking about Notre Dame, the school that has been taking advantage of his league for a while now by getting the benefits of conference membership without being in the conference, last year and undefeated Florida State being left out of the last four-team playoff despite being undefeated.

Of course, the FSU example is completely irrelevant since we already tripled the size of the playoff since then and the Seminoles would certainly not have been left out the past two years even without their quarterback.

Last season, Notre Dame’s 10 wins came against no one so both were rightly vulnerable going into selection day.

“Notre Dame could have won the whole thing!” is a popular talking point, and I suppose it is true. They also could have lost in the first round. Ohio State looked unbeatable for 12 weeks then lost its last two games so projections aren’t worth much once toe hits ball in an actual game.

At 10-2, Notre Dame just happened to have lost to one of the other bubble teams (Miami), and its schedule turned out to be a lot worse in real life than it looked on paper. (This is also why I think teams dropping big out-of-conference games now in hopes of enhancing their chances of making the playoff are short-sighted, but more on that below.)

Had USC or Arkansas been better or the rest of the ACC weren’t a joke, the Fighting Irish would have been ranked multiple spots ahead of the Hurricanes and then head-to-head wouldn’t have come into play.

Had they lost to Indiana or Ohio State or Georgia — literally anyone in the final top 10 except Miami — they would have made it last year instead of the Hurricanes (Notre Dame also lost to No. 7 TAMU) so missing the playoff was as much bad timing/luck as anything else because they tried to schedule harder, and head-to-head results have to matter. (Of course they also could have won either the Miami or TAMU game, so it’s not like getting in was totally out of their control like ’23 FSU.)

I thought the four-team playoff would jump to eight then be done, but I’ve always felt the best playoff was a 16-team field with automatic bids for every league (currently 10). That would be like a mini March Madness for college football and still include everyone with a legitimate claim to being the best team in the country.

Obviously that is never going to happen, but I still think it would be cool and healthy for the sport overall.

Of course no one in charge cares about those things even a little bit.

We’re now well into the “get as much money as we can before we die/retire or the roof falls in” stage of college athletics, and nothing is going to stop it at this point.

But it’s still disappointing to watch happen when there is absolutely no reason things need to be like this.

While the national writers were all mesmerized by the 12-team CFP when plans for it were leaked to them, many seem pretty opposed to the 24-team proposal.

Stewart Mandel of The Athletic implored his readers to make their voices known, including sending messages to the leaders of their favorites schools.

Why?

That’s it.

It’s hard to even quantify how much putting that many teams in the playoff would change the regular season.

Would 8-3 Minnesota vs. 7-4 Wisconsin mean more? Technically, yes, but to how many people? I mean their fans are already into it, but I guess it might increase the buzz by like 5% there. What about the rest of the country? Five percent might be high because there are still lots of other games to watch and really why would a fan of another team care who gets one of the last spots in a tournament they have no chance of winning?

That’s certainly nothing compared to millions of people tuning in to see a do-or-die game like Ohio State-Michigan in 2023 (or dozens of other years).

Games between basketball bubble teams are appointment viewing for exactly zero people now, but we’ll give CFB the benefit of the doubt. That number could probably hit 100 or so easily.

So while hardly any of the new games with “meaning” will actually move the meter, without question every game played by teams in the top 10 will matter much less.

Ohio State-Texas already felt a bit like an exhibition game this season (until Texas messed around and lost to a bad Florida Team, too) so that will only get a lot worse.

Will that drive down TV ratings? Maybe not… but probably. It will hurt the buzz and the feel which drive those things, and in general it is easy to just see the whole sport losing momentum after decades of growth.

And you know what else? The first round playoff games will be mostly dogs. Heck, most of the first round games in the 12-team playoff haven’t been good. Why would bringing in 12 more teams who are worse than the teams already making the playoff be better?

Before all that, there is another season to play this fall.

The post-spring rankings have been coming out, and this week CBS Sports writers voted Ohio State No. 1 in their poll that ranks all 138 teams.

The Buckeyes are followed by Texas and Oregon in the top three while Indiana is No. 6, USC 14th, Michigan 16th and Iowa 23rd.

The other six Ohio State opponents?

I’ve always felt that was inevitable.

It hasn’t happened yet, but it could this year — and Ohio State might be the team if its schedule ends up being as tough as predicted (no guarantee).

So cleveland.com did a nice breakdown of how the three-loss teams have fared in the 12-team playoff era.

They found 14 three-loss teams over the last two seasons with Alabama being the first team out in 2024, but the Crimson Tide (like Notre Dame last season) were a victim of bad luck (Clemson upsetting SMU in the ACC title game allowed the Tigers to steal a bid) like Notre Dame did last season and had a bad loss, as Texas did last season.

Ohio State obviously needs to avoid a bad loss, but the bad luck is out of their control.

As long as there are no bid-stealers, a 3-3 record against top 15 teams could get the Buckeyes in — especially if the teams they lose to (let’s say Texas, Oregon and Indiana) are all undefeated or at least close to it and therefore way above the bubble.

Of course, going undefeated works, too, but that looks like a big ask this season — and thanks to CFP expansion, it no longer means anything once the postseason begins. Just ask the 2025 Buckeyes.

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