Steve Sarkisian Says Ohio State Should Be Rewarded for Losing to Texas. He’s Right.
Steve Sarkisian just beat Ohio State and spent Monday arguing that Ohio State should get credit for the loss. Call it graciousness if you want, but Sarkisian has been burned by this exact situation before and does not want anyone else learning the lesson the hard way.
Texas trailed by 20 points on Saturday in Austin and scored 21 in the fourth quarter to win 24-23. Two days later, Sarkisian said this, via Ralph D. Russo of The Athletic: “Quite frankly, Ohio State should be rewarded for playing in this game against us, and so that’s my goal. Time will tell, you know. And this isn’t crying over spilled milk. I don’t think we got rewarded for going to Columbus last year in Week 1.”
He is right about last year and he is right about this year, and the College Football Playoff selection committee should take the hint.
Sarkisian Lived the Consequence
Texas went to Columbus last season in Week 1 and lost 14-7. That was one of three losses on the year, and the Longhorns missed the College Football Playoff.
Think about the incentive that created. Texas scheduled the hardest possible non-conference road game, played a one-score game against the eventual class of the sport, and got nothing for it. A team that had scheduled a September cupcake instead and finished with the same record would have been evaluated more kindly by the résumé math.
So Sarkisian is not being generous toward a rival. He is defending the value of the thing he just did, because if Ohio State gets buried for a one-point road loss, nobody with playoff ambitions schedules a game like this again.
The Schedule Problem Is Real
This is the larger fight behind the quote. Athletic directors are already asking whether marquee non-conference games are worth the risk under the current selection process. If the answer is no, the September slate turns into a month of tune-up games and everyone loses.
Fans lose the best weekend of early football and networks lose their marquee inventory. Mostly, the sport loses the games that build the narratives carrying it into January.
And the schools that keep scheduling tough out of principle end up punished for it, which is the exact opposite of what a selection process should produce.
Ohio State lost by one point on the road against a team that is now the best in the country. That is a data point in favor of Ohio State, not against it. The committee already has the tools to treat it that way, since the whole premise of a selection committee rather than a formula is that humans can weigh context.
The AP voters more or less got this right already. Ohio State dropped only five spots, from No. 1 to No. 6, and is the highest-ranked one-loss team in the country. That is a reasonable read on a one-point loss in a hostile environment.
The playoff committee should follow that logic in December. A one-score road loss to the top team in the sport in Week 2 should cost a team almost nothing relative to a comparable team that played nobody.
Sarkisian has every reason to spike the football right now. His team pulled off a 20-point comeback against Ohio State and moved to No. 1 in the country. Instead he used his Monday to make the case for the team he beat.
That is the correct use of the microphone, and the committee should listen to a coach who already paid the price for getting this wrong.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.