Outlive

Plenty of reasons why that crazy sentence is a) true b) full of caveats c) wildly impressive d) morbidly inspiring, and e) traumatizing for anyone over the age of 38 all at the same time. Strip it all down and you have math, exceptions, evolution and resilience.

The bowls had been a sneaky element to a polishing any college coaching legacy. For every prestige bowl game throughout history where teams left everything on the field in an attempt to win one of the big, gaudy trophies - there are several more tacky consumer product-sponsored consolation prize December junkets which often failed to inspire greatness.

For the aged readers - Rose Bowls = best. Orange, Fiesta, Sugar = no complaints. Citrus, Outback, Cotton = ehhh something went stinky in November. All others = let's not talk about it.

Those one-game pre-CFP seasons were tricky. If you guessed that the coaches with the most bowl wins throughout history were the legendary types you've definitely heard of before, congrats you are the smartest guy or girl in the whole sports bar.

Every single eligible coach in the top 50 all-time is already in the College Football Hall of Fame.

That asterisk next to Saban's total means something - nine of his 19 postseason wins are of the CFP variety. He coached in that bygone era where it was only possible to accumulate two of those per year.

It still comes out to 100% more than the previous century of football allowed. Mack Brown will be eligible for HOF induction in three years, but he never won a CFP game. New-inductee Urban Meyer is tied for no.6 among a bunch of coaches with 12 bowl wins, two playoff victories.

Earle Bruce is in a 20-way tie for no.41 all-time with seven, and now that the 2024 season has concluded, Day is now tied for no.61 all-time with six. Five of those are CFP wins. Four of them are still in heavy rotation in your head and chest.

Six postseason wins in six seasons feels impressive - and it was impossible for any Big Ten coach to pull off as recently as 1972 when it got rid of the no-repeat rule. Add the 2020 B1G title game (that's the postseason too) and Day has seven postseason wins over six seasons.

But math, exceptions, evolution and resilience are what make this category so tricky.

Jim Tressel is one of the guys tied with Earle, his former boss. His postseason win total (7) does not include his stretch at Youngstown State, where his Penguins were postseason regulars. Add those FCS games to his legacy and that seven becomes 29.

Jim Tressel FINISHED HIS COACHING CAREER WITH seven bowl wins. Add his FCS playoff victories and his postseason win total swells to 29.

As for Coop, he is in a massive pileup at no.85 all-time with five bowl wins (he got two others at Arizona State) and he's tied with guys like Bret Bielema, Marcus Freeman, Tom Herman, Lane Kiffin, Glen Mason, Bo Schembechler and one other coach we'll discuss shortly. Hall-of-Famers, legends, up-and-comers, Joey Freshwater, spectacular flame-outs and Bert. Best sport ever.

But Coop brought home just three postseason trophies between 1988 and 2000, which matches what Day's outgoing team is currently finding new shelf space for at the Woody. Ohio State didn't get any hardware for humiliating Tennessee, only fond and hilarious memories. It's fine, they should just make their own trophy for that.

As for this playoff run, it still feels absolutely surreal. If college football has been a major part of your life for longer than a couple decades, what we just witnessed feels impossible - and the good news is that no program should benefit more from the 12-team playoff than, you guessed it, your favorite one.

No program would have benefited more from a 12-team playoff since the inception of the CFP in 2014. via

As for the feelingsball that's still palpable after a 4-0 postseason, we just aren't conditioned to understand how to emotionally respond to a run like that in one month. It's way too much adrenalin, serotonin, oxytocin - rattle off every happiness hormone coursing through your body, there are others - for us to process. We're drunk on happiness, and oof we needed that after Nov 30.

Prior to the CFP, we could barely contain our excitement over one postseason win. The 2014 CFP still lubricates our memory stores and that was a decade ago - add in the 59-0 B1G title game ticket-puncher against Wisconsin - why would you ever exclude that - and it was until recently our postseason Run for the Ages.

Nothing could ever compare to that, right? Even putting Dabo in a pine box in a cavernous Louisiana Superdome that no one reading this was able to attend in person still has good vibes.

The 2024 Buckeyes eclipsed the bowl game win total of every John Cooper Ohio State team combined, a true juiced-ball era stat for barstool analysts to try and solve. Coop's 1997 Rose Bowl win against Arizona State was the best four hours of his tenure. It's possible to argue each of the 2024 Buckeyes' final four games were better.

But just imagine if that ASU classic had been the first game of a CFP bracket.

Think of what might have come next for beleaguered Coop and the Buckeyes of that era which could not stop losing their final regular season game every year. Day turned the modern version of rock bottom into the bounciest jumping off point the program has ever seen.

Ryan Day could and probably should have two national titles right now in seasons where Gold Pants were not acquired.

His current coaching epitaph, still unwritten, is that he's an elite championship coach who recruits and develops at an enviable level while sustaining a chronic Michigan problem we can only keep hoping he's able to figure out and solve.

Hey, do you know who else was like that? Of course you do.

That guy might be remembered differently today if he had been given a second chance to rewrite the season finale - think 1993, 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1998 - which is now readily accessible to his former program, currently copying the tragic endings he made famous.

Day's last four teams each emulated Coop's classic journey, barreling toward a national title shot before eliminating themselves in November. And yet evolution allowed the 2022 team to sneak into the CFP where it was a made field goal away from dethroning the defending champions in their backyard in the national semifinal.

It just happened again - Day could and probably should have two national titles right now in seasons where Gold Pants were not acquired. His 2024 team will be hanging a new placard in the closed end of the Horseshoe this fall.

The Buckeyes just turned a four-game gauntlet into exhibition of superiority we'll talk about forever, because four postseason wins in a month is hard to do in college basketball. The reigning champs are quite literally a one of one. How many retired and expired coaches might have been able to do that? I can think of one. He's 87 and still lives in Columbus.

Venture back to his 1998 season (the year college football finally decided to determine its national champion on the field via the BCS) and take a look at how far back each then-Big Ten program had to travel in time to accumulate four bowl wins. They were so goddamn hard to come by heading into the new century.

Three programs didn't even have four postseason wins when the BCS began.

Ohio State, in Coop's tinged golden era required 11 years to capture its most-recent four bowl wins. Only Penn State and Michigan could stay in the current decade to count backwards that quickly. It took the FBS too long to create a meaningful postseason for more teams.

The FCS got a head start with its four-team playoff in 1978, then quickly expanded it to eight teams in 1981 and then 12 in 1982. This puts the FBS nearly four decades behind the junior league in postseason expansion.

They've been at 24 teams (eight byes!) since 2013, with a stripped-down 2020 postseason being the exception. That doesn't dilute FCS football at all, nor does it make Tressel's 29 postseason wins any less impressive. He just had access.

While the FBS didn't finally capitulate to a playoff until a decade ago, it did expand bowl games while resisting a postseason tournament. There were eight bowl games when Woody Hayes arrived in Columbus, and only six of his 28 seasons were without the no-repeat rule which kept many of his elite teams from playing after Michigan.

The Buckeyes played in four bowl games during his first 21 seasons in Columbus. They played in seven during his final seven years as Ohio State's head coach. Evolution.

By the time Earle took over, the number of bowl games had nearly doubled to 15. Eighteen were held when Coop showed up, and when the CFP began in 2014 that number swelled to 39. A coach could go 6-5 every season and take his players on a little trip. Woody's teams didn't get that luxury 80% of the time during his first two decades.

But expansion created an interesting dynamic. Hayes and Coop both coached in 11 bowl games. Under the current rules, Woody would have gotten into the 12-team playoff 15 times, Coop four, Tressel eight, Meyer six (they would have been left out in 2012 due to the postseason ban) and Day six.

Earlier in column:

As for Coop, he is in a massive pileup at no.85 all time with five bowl wins - he won a couple at Arizona State - and he's tied with guys like Bret Bielema, Marcus Freeman, Tom Herman, Lane Kiffin, Glen Mason, Bo Schembechler and one other coach we'll discuss shortly.

That other coach was Woody. When the Buckeyes beat Notre Dame in Atlanta, Day passed the guy for whom the practice facility is named in career postseasons wins.

We aren't entering a new era for piling up commemorative sweatshirt wins, we cracked open the lid in 1972 and it began gushing in 1998. Here's how the current conference counts backwards to four postseason wins.

IU has been stuck on three for 33 years. Every other team but Bert has four this century.

That extra game used to be rare and elusive, which helped solidify coaching legends for the first century of college football. In the quarter century that's passed since the Mythical National Championship era ended, the sport has shifted to natties. Rivalry games. Playoff wins. Unshared conference titles - in the B1G since 2011, anyway - but it's probably unwise to buy futures in those trophies' values going forward.

What this all means is postseason wins as a measuring stick is full of pre-4K television caveats now, especially coming off of what Ohio State pulled off to end 2024. The playoff probably isn't diminishing rivalries as much as it's creating more value in the entire regular season now, but we'll need a few more years to confirm.

One thing we can conclude after just one 12-team playoff: Poor ol' Coop was born too soon.