FIESTA BOWL CHAMPS
Ohio State’s J.K. Dobbins is tackled by players for victorious Clemson, which will face LSU in the national championship game Jan. 13.
COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYOFF :: SEMIFINALS FIESTA BOWL | NO. 3 CLEMSON 29, NO. 2 OHIO STATE 23 CHAMPIONSHIP GAME: CLEMSON VS. LSU, JAN. 13, 5 P.M. PST TV: ESPN
GLENDALE, Ariz. — Needing four yards on fourth down for a chance to put defending national champion Clemson away, Ohio State coach Ryan Day decided to punt the ball back to a goldenlocked quarterback who has never lost a college football game.
Trevor Lawrence needed to go 94 yards in three minutes to keep his remarkable unblemished record intact and advance the No. 3 Tigers to their second consecutive title bout. The sophomore quickly took over the offensive huddle from Clemson coach Dabo Swinney and told his teammates, “I love all you guys. Let’s go win this thing.”
One minute later, Clemson had used just three plays to arrive at the Ohio State 34. There, Lawrence got the signal for a clever quarterback-keeper-turned-pass to Travis Etienne, a play the Tigers had not been executing well in practice.
“I didn’t feel super confident about it,” Lawrence said.
Yet, in typical Clemson fashion, the call worked to perfection. Etienne blazed into the end zone for his
Clemson.
The Tigers’ reward for winning their 29th in a row? A CFP final match with No. 1 Louisiana State on Jan. 13 in New Orleans’ Superdome in front of tens of thousands of rowdy Cajuns.
For Ohio State, Saturday night was three years in the making. On New Year’s Eve in 2016, Clemson systematically slaughtered the Buckeyes 31-0 inside the same shiny and silver desert orb that’s now called State Farm Stadium. Three days later, Urban Meyer hired Day, then an assistant with the San Francisco 49ers, as his co-offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach.
It was no secret to Meyer, who won two national championships at Florida and one at Ohio State, that the Buckeyes needed to continue to evolve into a team that might play and reside in the Big Ten Conference but more resembled a Southeastern Conference program in the way it was built. The 2016 humbling only reinforced how far Ohio State needed to go.
The Buckeyes just needed more time — and perhaps a little luck. Meyer exited the stage last year in the aftermath of scandal, leaving the program in Day’s hands, which became much more capable when Fields transferred from Georgia to Ohio State and was granted immediate eligibility by the NCAA to play in 2019.
Fields, a Kennesaw, Ga., native with exceptional speed and physical grace, fit right in with the skill players Ohio State was already collecting from locales strategically outside the Big Ten footprint. The Buckeyes plucked running back J.K. Dobbins and wide receiver Garrett Wilson out of Texas. Receivers Chris Olave (California), KJ Hill (Arkansas) and Binjimen Victor (Florida) rounded out a core of non-Midwesterners that Woody Hayes never would have believed necessary for Ohio State to have a puncher’s chance against a powerhouse from the South.
So, in the first quarter Saturday, when Dobbins burst through a hole and outran the back end of the Clemson defense for a 68yard touchdown to give the Buckeyes a 10-0 lead, more meaning was attached to it than one could understand if they didn’t cheer for a traditionally plodding Big Ten school.
“68 YARDS THROUGH THE HEART OF THE SOUTH,” exclaimed a tweet from the Twitter account of “Eleven Warriors,” an Ohio State fan site.
Ohio State jumped out to a 16-0 lead, but Clemson coach Dabo Swinney never allowed his team to panic. He trusted his players, some of whom had helped the Tigers win two of the last three national titles. Swinney is the first to admit that he doesn’t have to go far to stock his roster with bluechippers, especially now that the results match the Southern charm.
With five straight trips to the CFP, Clemson has changed the meaning of the verb “Clemsoning” from shrinking in the biggest moments to rising to any occasion. All the Tigers need is a window, and they’ll blow right through it. That opening came in the second quarter when Ohio State cornerback Shaun Wade was called for targeting on Lawrence, extending a drive the Tigers dearly needed.
They’d score a touchdown on a nifty eight-yard cutback run by Etienne, and before too long, the leggy Lawrence would be chugging down the field for an improbable 67-yard touchdown run that cut right through the heart of any earlier notion Ohio State had truly caught up to Clemson.
In the third quarter, the Tigers continued to run away from the Buckeyes on a 53-yard touchdown pass from Lawrence to Etienne in which the running back took a screen pass and did all the work himself.
Clemson’s 21 unanswered points — well on the way to 2016’s 31 — raised the question: Could the Buckeyes retake what was theirs in the first half? And if they couldn’t, if this juggernaut Ohio State team wasn’t good enough, what message would that send to all the other teams located north of the Mason-Dixon line?
The Buckeyes did answer once, on a Fields pass to Olave that put them up 23-21 with 11:46 to go. But Fields could not answer Lawrence, the sport’s unicorn of a quarterback, a second time.