Hey, hey, where you been, but got talk is about to begin, hey, hey, hey, come on in.

Welcome back to my emergency Buckeye Talk. Ohio State lives in a hotel room, and I wasn't planning to pod tonight, but I brought my microphone just in case, and if Jeff, the tech subscriber is out there listening, I was at a sports bar in Chicago watching the first half of Utah, USC, and coincidentally, and Ohio State tech subscriber, and a Buckeye Talk listener was there, and Jeff came over and said hello, and maybe he set Utah off on to victory,

and Ohio State is going to make the playoff. We're going to talk about this briefly. We're going to come back on Sunday once the playoff is announced, but Ohio State's in, the committee set this up, and we're not, I think we're doing this pod so you can listen to something while you're jumping up and down.

We talked with our tech subscribers before this happened, about how you would feel about the possibility. There certainly was a group of people who thought, like, I don't really want any part of Ohio State in the playoff.

I think they deserve it. I can't get past the Michigan loss, and we're going to ask those people again, and I think everybody might be like, yeah, no, no, I'm fine.

Here is the tech subscriber question that I asked before all of this, which is closer to your view of Ohio State situation. If they make the playoff great, if they don't, that's fine, 52%.

They are one of the four best teams and deserve to make it 27%. They lost to Michigan. They don't deserve to make the playoff 21%. So it's that 21%. I'm really interested in because we have to talk about the word deserve here.

And I will just start off by saying it's a stroke of luck for Ohio State that Ryan Day wasn't fired after Michigan loss, or it would be really inconvenient to have to find an interim head coach for the playoff.

So disaster avoided on that one. Thank goodness. They did not fire their 11-1 coach after a loss to the rival.

Deserve is a funny word. We have made this four team playoff, and it's not the teams that deserve to make it because sometimes deserve, right? What is deserve?

Deserve is a word we use in sports a lot, and I've actually gotten aggravated with some of the opinions about deserve.

Even during the course of that game, sometimes three teams deserve it, but we decided on four. Sometimes six deserve it. Sometimes two deserve it.

Frankly, I feel like some people right now would be happy for Georgia and Michigan to go undefeated, play in a two team national championship game, and just leave TCU out like Auburn got left out as an undefeated team.

I'd be like, oh, well, sorry, because there really maybe isn't a fourth team by the criteria of deserve that makes the field, right?

But I'm not sure what that means anymore, and the thing that aggravates me about the conversation, and I'm not saying I wasn't on the other side of that at times, is in no other sport do we demand near perfection to deserve a chance at playing for championship.

But does not exist anywhere else. Since 90 Bengals last year were a wildcard team, and they made the playoff and they made the Super Bowl.

This year the Kansas City Chiefs lost to the Indianapolis Colts. The Chiefs might be the best team in football. The Colts are one of the worst they fight at their coach.

But if this was college football, we would have had Andy Reed staring out into the abyss, the way Urban Meyer was staring out into the abyss after the loss to Utah in 2017.

We have to let teams lose, and I'm not saying this because Ohio State lost to Michigan because I do think the rivalry always hurts no matter what the context is.

But the idea that if you lose, that means you are not deserving of playing for a championship. You lost your last game to your rival, and you gave up too late touchdown runs.

Do you don't deserve to play in it? USC lost to USC twice.

Excuse me, USC lost to Utah twice, and their quarterback was limping through it at the end, and they have defensive holes.

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