DALLAS — During pre-game warmups, less than an hour before the National Championship Game, Urban Meyer paced outside the Ohio State locker room with headphones in his ears. He vigorously chomped on a stick of gum and he talked to Mickey Marotti, who doubles as his strength and conditioning coach and right-hand man.
Whether he grew restless or curious, he walked toward a dimly lit tunnel that led to the insides of AT&T Stadium, where college football’s grandest spectacle was starting to unfold and as its onlookers — so many of them clad in scarlet and gray — poured into the thousands of seats that line this cavernous structure.
He sauntered a few steps-and-a-half out to observe the scene before fans, who hovered immediately overhead in their Buckeye necklaces and Brutus Buckeye hats, shrieked as if they were 16-year-old girls at an Elvis Presley concert in 1968. He looked up, flashed a wide smile, and quickly scooted back to the shadows, back to the headphones still in his ears and back to chomping on his gum; it was back to that cold stare and the focus that turned Meyer, who claimed two titles in the glare of this spotlight, into a modern coaching icon.
This was a man who's been here before.
If the moment wasn’t enough evidence of Meyer’s rockstar mystique, then watching the Buckeyes head coach win his third national title after a 42-20 conquering of Oregon Monday night was.
On the sport’s biggest stage, Meyer regained a lost throne as the sport’s alpha coach and his Buckeyes, which overcame the loss of two star quarterbacks in three months amidst other trials and tribulations, became the nation's new overlords.
"The Chase," Meyer said, referring to a furious quest for a championship, "is complete."
Ohio State, in spite of improbable odds that discarded it as castaways after three-year starter Braxton Miller suffered a season-ending injury in August, gut-punched Oregon’s defense for 538 yards and flustered an Oregon offense that was supposed to be too fast and too swift for the Buckeyes to keep pace. Cardale Jones, formerly the team's third-string quarterback, passed for 242 yards and a touchdown and lumbered for 38 yards on 21 carries.
The Buckeyes committed four turnovers — three by Jones — but still won by three touchdowns.
It's been that kind of season for Ohio State, whose campaign has been defined by overcoming adversity, be it Miller's injury, a humiliating loss to unranked Virginia Tech at home or when J.T. Barrett, Miller's original backup, went down after going 11-1 as a starter.
"Everybody counted us out when our Heisman Trophy quarterback went down," Jones said. "Long story short, we weren't supposed to be here ... all the odds were stacked against us through the whole season."
But before the bout, Ohio State glowed with a certain confidence after toppling top-ranked Alabama in the Sugar Bowl less than two weeks ago.
Before the game, Meyer declared that the title bout of the first-ever College Football Playoff "doesn’t have to be close," junior tackle Taylor Decker said.
"And if we do what we do, it won’t be."
Despite such miscues that offered Oregon chances to sprint back into the game and make the contest a competitive affair in the third quarter, Ohio State and its powerful run game crushed the Ducks, much like it did against the vaunted Crimson Tide and the hope of a comeback behind Marcus Mariota, the fearless quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner.
Ezekiel Elliott, the sophomore running back who trounced Alabama, did more of the same against Oregon, rushing for 246 yards and four touchdowns on 36 carries.
"I knew going into the game that we wanted to run the ball. We knew that our O-line was bigger and more physical than their D-line, and we just had to punch them in the mouth," he said.
"They played their butts off and they paved the way for me. He was hitting, and he just kept feeding me the ball."
Elliott, who averaged 6.8 yards a carry, made the Ducks pay every time behind a moving wall that pushed Oregon backward.
"We’re an offensive line driven program," junior tackle Taylor Decker said. "You just gotta grind it out, you gotta be gritty, you gotta be tougher than they are."
Added Decker: "I think that’s when we ran away with it."
As time expired Monday night, when Mariota rolled clockwise, planted his foot, and fired one last desperate pass that fell hopelessly into the arms of cornerback Eli Apple for a rare interception, the Buckeyes spilled onto the field as gold, black and white confetti blotted out the sky and covered the turf in a sea of colors.
Marotti, the stout and gruff strength coach, leaped into the long, outstretched arms of Decker. LeBron James, the NBA megastar who roamed the sideline, snapped photos like a tourist, and players crowned themselves with hats that said, “Undisputed National Champions." The pulse of the stadium raced as chants of "O-H-I-O" boomed from section to section. A man in the upper deck waved the Ohio state flag in the air.
On a stage at midfield, the nucleus of the coronation, redshirt freshman linebacker Darron Lee scowled and bobbed his head up and down while his teammates took turns fussing over the game's trophy like it were a newborn child.
You couldn't hear him, but you could read his lips: "No. 1," he said. "We're No. 1. No. 1. No. 1."
It’s been 12 seasons since the Buckeyes have been able to call themselves nation's top team. And after Braxton Miller, the three-year starter and star quarterback, suffered a season-ending injury 12 days before the team’s opener in August, it looked like it might have to wait another season.
"This team wasn't supposed to do this," Meyer said. "I've watched football for a long time … I've never seen anything like it.”
Before the game, back in football-crazed Columbus at the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center, newborn babies laid wrapped in red blankets that read, “One down, One to go, 1-12-15.”
After the contest, students, who began their second semester earlier in the day, were said to have flocked to Mirror Lake as it was some sort of religious obligation to celebrate. Others stormed into Ohio Stadium where they reportedly tore down the goal posts in jubilation.
Football matters in Ohio, and Meyer — who grew up in Ashtabula before chasing his coaching dreams near and far — gets it.
"I'm not shy about the love I have for this great state," he said. "I've got to travel all around the country and I realized how fortunate I am to grow up in a great town like that in a great state ... to bring now a national title to the great state of Ohio, it's almost surreal."
In late November of 2011, when Meyer was hired to restore a proud program that had been rocked by NCAA sanctions, he vowed to make "the great state of Ohio proud."
And on this night far from home, he delivered it the championship it has so deeply yearned for under the most unlikely of circumstances.
"It seems like we've been through everything," Elliott said, "and it made us who we were."
