A 120-point semifinal, a rematch in New Orleans, and the belt on the line.
Good evening.
We have a national championship game. We also have the same national championship game we had last year, which either tells you these are the two best programs in the league or tells you nobody else has figured out how to stop them. Possibly both. Let's get to it.
Penn State 42, Miami 21. The quarterfinal we'd all been waiting on because it was the last thing standing between us and a Final Four. States handled it. Lute's season, which included a first-round win where his team scored fourteen points and that was enough, ends at 12-3.
Twenty-one points is a respectable number in most contexts. Not this one.
One hundred and twenty points. In a semifinal. I want to be careful here because I know how this sounds, but at no point did either of these teams appear to be trying to play defense, and I could not have enjoyed it more.
Here's the thing about Notre Dame: they came in having outscored two playoff opponents 83-7. They shut out a rested Oregon team with a top-four seed. Tayne's postseason, in order, was 62-7, 21-0, and then a 57-point loss. He scored 140 points in three playoff games and went home. That is a genuinely strange sentence to type.
And here's the thing about Stew: he gave up 57 points and won anyway. Fifteen and oh. Two seasons, one loss, and it came in last year's opening stretch. Whatever you think about how he got there, he keeps getting there.
The best thing I saw: Tayne, three weeks after losing 38-7 and explaining at considerable length that he hadn't started his starters, wasn't at the controller, and would rather play in round one anyway — going out in a 120-point semifinal having scored 57 on the eventual finalist. He got the round-one game he wanted. He nearly got a lot more than that.
Considerably less chaos, considerably more control. LT led it, kept it, and never gave States the run he needed. Clemson goes to 14-1.
Penn State's season: won the Big Ten by four over Ohio State, took the 3 seed, dispatched Miami by 21, and ran into a team playing better. Nothing to apologize for. Nothing to celebrate either.
They're doing it again.
Oklahoma and Clemson, for the national championship, one year after Oklahoma beat Clemson 42-28 in Las Vegas for the first belt of the accredited cycle. Stew is 15-0. LT is 14-1. New Orleans, Caesars Superdome.
And the belt is the actual prize here, not a metaphor. Stew holds it with one championship. Win, and he owns it outright at two, in year two of twenty, and everybody else spends eighteen seasons climbing. Lose, and LT pulls level at one apiece and the Campus King Belt is shared for the first time in league history.
That's not a talking point. That's the scoreboard.
Oklahoma hasn't been within two scores of losing since Florida in Week 8, won the SEC final by 42, and then won a semifinal by giving up 57 — which is either a warning sign or proof they'll beat you however you'd like to play it.
Clemson went 8-0 in ACC play, took its conference final by 21, and has now won a 52-42 shootout and a controlled 35-21 semifinal in consecutive weeks. LT has beaten teams two different ways this month. He's also the only man in this game who knows what it feels like to lose it.
One more. See you in New Orleans.
