Ohio State football: 5 reasons OSU will crush Washington, win Rose Bowl

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Ohio State football Urban Meyer (Photo by Kirk Irwin/Getty Images) /

The Ohio State Buckeyes look to bring home a consecutive bowl victories as they play the Washington Huskies in the Rose Bowl.

As the new year nears, so does the Buckeyes’ annual bowl game play date. This year comes to yet another upsetting end though as the Bucks have been snubbed from the playoffs even after winning consecutive Big Ten championships.

Led by Heisman Trophy finalist quarterback Dwayne Haskins, the Buckeyes lost just one game all season but still found a way to not get the call.

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Buckeye fans aren’t the only ones upset about this though. Fans of college football as a whole were treated to an awful display of competitive athletics over the weekend.

The College Football Playoff semifinal was incredibly hard to watch as neither game was competitive and didn’t produce the slightest bit of entertainment. Fortunately, there wasn’t an incredible amount of hype surrounding this Playoff as everyone had a good idea of what was going to happen anyway.

The Buckeyes have beaten some of the best teams in the nation this season and have won consecutive titles in what is frequently viewed as one of the top conferences in the nation yet they are left out in favor of a team without an impressive win and a team who doesn’t even play on championship weekend.

The Buckeyes did everything they needed to do at the end of the season to make the Playoff and they still didn’t make the cut. One would think that the committee would want to pick the team who clearly has the best shot to beat Alabama in the Playoff to make things interesting.

The last time the Buckeyes faced Alabama, the Buckeyes prevailed and the ratings were a huge success. This team still has Urban Meyer at head coach and now one of the best quarterbacks to ever go through the program.

This Buckeyes team just completely demolished Michigan who had the best defense in the country in a few categories in the last week of the regular season.

They went on to cruise to a comfortable victory in the Big Ten conference championship as well. The argument that Northwestern was not that great of a conference championship opponent was also utterly ridiculous as well. Northwestern lost to Michigan by just three points and led most of the game. They also lost to Notre Dame by just ten points where the game was tied as halftime.

There’s only so much the Buckeyes could do to try to save their season after losing by 20+ points to Purdue earlier in the season. It is worth noting that the loss was before the bye week and the Buckeyes had got much better after that point but that clearly wasn’t anything they cared about.

The Buckeyes’ postseason hopes were doomed after that point as everyone had a great time holding that over their heads as long as they possibly could. The signs of a broken Playoff selection system were exposed once again this season though as the semifinal games were unwatchable.

A large reason for the committee’s refusal to consider the Buckeyes for a Playoff spot was their 31-0 loss to Clemson in the 2016 semifinal.

It’s understandable that they’d be hard to trust in the Playoff again but the consequence for that year’s performance should not have been held against this team. The Buckeyes had one of their best seasons overall with a quarterback and receiving corps that is far superior than the one displayed in 2016.

The Buckeyes ranked second in the nation in yards per game as compared to 29th back in 2016.

A positive note to take from this is that this same punishment will be placed on a different team in specific moving forward. Notre Dame lost 30-3 in this year’s CFP semifinal.

This was their first appearance in the College Football Playoff and will likely be their last unless they join a conference. They cannot be trusted any longer until they play in a real conference and have to play for a championship. The Buckeyes will now certainly be next in line when it comes to a chance at a Playoff spot given the other teams bring no competitive threat at that level.

For now, the Buckeyes have their focus set on the Rose Bowl taking place on New Year’s day.

The Huskies will be no pushover as they took down PAC-12 front runner Washington State on the road to end the regular season and went on to win the conference championship. The Huskies are another team that needs to clean up their image with the committee if they ever want to make the Playoff again so they’ll definitely be fired up for this one.

This could also be Dwayne Haskins’ last game as the quarterback for the Buckeyes before entering the NFL Draft.

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