COLUMBUS, Ohio — The opening weekend of the first 12-team edition of the College Football Playoff was filled with mismatches.
Especially the pairing with the most potential.
Ninth-seeded Tennessee could not keep up with eighth-seeded Ohio State on a frigid Saturday night inside Ohio Stadium, falling 42-17 to the Buckeyes before a crowd of 102,819. Tennessee fans comprised roughly a third of the audience but saw Josh Heupel’s fourth season come to an end with a 10-3 record.
“I’m disappointed for our fans and for our team and everything we’ve put into it since January,” Heupel said afterward. “We didn’t coach or play well early in this one. There wasn’t a phase of the football game where we operated the way we needed to early in the game. We came back and made a couple of plays at the end of the second quarter to tighten it up, but we just didn’t function well enough at the beginning of the third quarter, either.
“That’s a credit to Ohio State, but we just didn’t do what we had to on the road. We have a lot of guys who just played their last game in a Tennessee uniform, and I’m really proud of them, too.”
Ohio State improved to 11-2 and advanced to the Rose Bowl quarterfinal on New Year’s Day in Pasdena, California, where the Buckeyes will face top-seeded Oregon (13-0), the Big Ten champion that had a first-round bye. It’s a rematch from the regular season, when the host Ducks won 32-31 on Oct. 12.
Buckeyes quarterback Will Howard shredded the Vols, completing 24 of 29 passes for 311 yards while also rushing five times for 37 more.
The Buckeyes racked up 473 total yards while holding Tennessee to 256, reflecting complete domination by the hosts on both sides of the line of scrimmage.
“It goes hand in hand as far as your back end and your front in terms of doing different things coverage-wise to give your front the best chance to be successful,” Tennessee defensive coordinator Tim Banks said. “We just weren’t able to find that combination tonight to give us a chance to play winning defense.”
The Buckeyes reeled off the game’s first 21 points, with Howard’s 37-yard scoring strike to Jeremiah Smith capping their first drive and his 40-yard connection to Emeka Egbuka to Tennessee’s 6 highlighting their second possession. By the time TreVeyon Henderson’s 29-yard touchdown run put Ohio State up 21-0 with 3:27 left in the first quarter, the Buckeyes had 191 yards to Tennessee’s minus-6.
“Defensively, in that first series, we had a chance to get off the field,” Heupel said, referring to a facemask penalty that negated Bryson Eason’s third-down sack of Howard. “We had a couple of busts in man coverage, and they made some plays, too. That’s going to happen against a good team, but what we didn’t do was find a way to come back and get on the right side of it, and that’s everybody.”
Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava’s 2-yard keeper with 20 seconds before halftime capped a 16-play, 79-yard drive to make it 21-10, but the Vols stalled early in the third quarter, and Howard found Smith from 22 yards out to put the Buckeyes back in control at 28-10.
Iamaleava completed 14 of 31 passes for only 104 yards, and the redshirt freshman rushed a career-high 20 times for 47 yards and two touchdowns.
“We weren’t creating big plays in the passing game,” Vols offensive coordinator Joey Halzle said. “We weren’t creating big windows, and we had some difficulty up front. It was with the entire unit, because we just couldn’t get anything to pop, and that’s why you ended up seeing him run with the ball in his hand a lot.”
Said Iamaleava: “I did not expect to run it that many times. We had some shots that were there, but we just didn’t execute overall as a team.”
Vols junior running back Dylan Sampson had just two first-half carries for 6 yards due to a left hamstring injury. Sampson tried to go in the second half but had one catch for 2 yards.
“We knew Dylan wasn’t at 100%, and we knew he was going to go in there early and give it a shot,” Halzle said. “He’s the SEC offensive player of the year. He makes everything go, and losing him and not even having him at full speed was tough.
“When you don’t have a guy of his caliber, it hurts.”
The 25-degree temperature at kickoff matched the third-coldest start in Tennessee history and the coldest ever for a Vols road game.
“It sucks to go out that way,” Iamaleava said. “That’s not who we are.”
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.