Nevius: Controversy, debate and the end of a strange college football season

Not many of us seem to be paying much attention, but the college football national championship game is Monday night.

Ohio State will meet Alabama for the title in Miami. And getting there has been a wild ride.

The gymnastics the NCAA needed to pull off this season are either a miracle or a good reason why they shouldn’t have attempted it in the first place.

It’s like the review of the elephant that could tap dance. It isn’t so much that it was done well, but that it was done at all.

It all starts with COVID, of course, but at the end of the day Ohio State is the pivot point. And the weird part is OSU did nothing wrong.

This goes back to the days of late summer, when we were realizing the coronavirus was no hoax. In those days, when we were wearing gloves to the supermarket, the phrase “abundance of caution” was all the rage.

The Big Ten Conference, home of Ohio State, was all in. It announced that the football season was over. No games until the virus was under control.

It was a reasonable idea. The Pac-12 said the same thing.

But Big Ten parents went ballistic. And, minus the hysteria, they had a point.

The NFL started full-contact football and the outbreaks seemed containable. Also, Alabama’s Southeastern Conference set out to play a shortened, but pretty full, season, which is how Alabama got to 10-0.

Eventually the Big Ten (and Pac-12) relented and tried to put together a half-season on the fly. It would be an understatement to say there have been some hiccups.

The quick recap is that COVID-19 was a problem. Teams were sidelined, games were canceled. The upshot was that Ohio State only played six games, winning them all.

The controversy came when the College Football Playoff committee named Ohio State one of the four playoff teams for the national title, leapfrogging other qualified teams. Basically, it looks like they got in because they are Ohio State.

And, because it is college football, we had to have a little regional smack talk. OSU’s semifinal opponent was Clemson. And Clemson’s coach, the marvelously named Dabo Swinney, made a point to rank the Buckeyes 11th in his coaches poll.

“It’s not that they’re not good enough,” Swinney told USA Today. “I just don’t think it is right that three teams have to play 13 games to be the champion and one team has to play eight.” (OSU’s six games in the conference, plus the semifinal and final.)

Critics added that Ohio State may have won all its games, but not always impressively. It was said the game with Clemson would be time for the Buckeyes to put up or shut up.

They put up. Big.

Much-doubted quarterback Justin Fields threw six touchdown passes in a 49-28 (and it wasn’t that close) takedown of Dabo’s guys.

Meanwhile in the other semifinal, Alabama was methodically dismantling Notre Dame. Bay Area (Antioch) native Najee Harris ran for more than 120 yards, which was actually a mild disappointment.

In the SEC championship, Harris had a conference-record five touchdowns (three on pass receptions), rushed for 178 yards and was named MVP.

Harris is 230 pounds and fast. It’s hard to catch him and if you do, he shakes you off. Or, as he did in the conference game, hurdles completely over you and keeps going.

All of which sets up Monday night’s game with Ohio State in Florida.

And, because it is college football, we had to have a little regional smack talk. It happened because Ohio State is now the Big Ten team with potential COVID outbreaks. There has been talk that Monday’s game might have to be postponed.

This set off ― of all people ― the daughter of Alabama football coach Nick Saban. She proceeded to get a very useful lesson on the power and pitfalls of social media.

Kristen Saban Setas sent out a tweet calling “BS on the COVID cases.” The real plan, she suggested, is to buy time to give Fields more time to recover.

Fields took a helmet shot to the ribs against Clemson that was so egregious that the tackler was ejected for targeting. Fields’ recovery is one of the plotlines in the run-up to the game.

The other is if the virus will make many of the OSU players ineligible.

At this point the answers are: The game is on, Fields will play and the Buckeyes should be almost at full strength.

Meanwhile, Saban’s daughter has issued an apology. No wonder. She’d been scorched on Twitter, although some of it was good-natured.

In her first tweet she’d suggested OSU should just play its backup quarterback.

Former Ohio State QB Cardale Jones clapped back, “sure you wanna face another backup from OSU? You know what happened last time.”

Jones, a third-string quarterback, was forced into action against Alabama in a semifinal in 2015 because of injuries. He led OSU to a 42-35 upset.

Hey, it’s college football. We had to have a little regional smack talk.

Contact C.W. Nevius at cw.nevius@pressdemocrat.com. Twitter: @cwnevius