ATLANTA – Both Ohio State and Notre Dame will break a threshold Monday night that no college programs have ever reached. And they don’t need to be reminded of what it means to get ready for their 16th game this season means because their bodies are doing it for them.
“Anybody that says they’re 100 percent that’s been playing is lying. Offense, defense, Ohio State, anybody — they’re lying,” Notre Dame defensive tackle Howard Cross said. “Especially this long. This is uncharted territory for everybody. But you’ve just got to keep pushing. At this point, it’s just who lasts longer.”
With college athletes now earning money through name, image and likeness deals and soon to receive revenue sharing checks via the House vs. NCAA settlement, we don’t hear much anymore about how the length of the college football season impacts player health.
But the 12-team College Football Playoff, and likelihood that most teams who get this far will play 16 or 17 games, is the now arguably the most important factor in how to build a championship roster and to keep it relatively healthy through a longer grind than any college program has ever faced.
In fact, the possibility of playing this much football factored so heavily into how Ohio State approached the season that head coach Ryan Day deliberately slowed down the pace of the Buckeyes’ offense in hopes of reducing wear and tear and keeping players as fresh as possible for the postseason run.
“You save 10 plays a game, you save 150 plays (a season),” Ohio State defensive coordinator Jim Knowles said. “Everything is set up by him from the jump of a long season.”
The numbers aren’t quite that dramatic. Heading into Monday’s championship game, Ohio State has run 61.8 offensive plays per game. That’s a bit down from 63.9 a year ago and 67.4 in 2022.
But the point remains: In a different era, with as much offensive talent as the Buckeyes have at their disposal, Day might have been tempted to play a bunch of track meets and maximize the advantage of having so much skill with his running backs and receivers. But the bigger picture as always about preparing for this moment and making sure Day didn’t bring a physically or mentally fried team into the College Football Playoff.
“I think our energy has continued to grow,” Day said. “I think you talk about the mental fatigue, I just don’t see that with our guys. I think it’s only increased, the energy is increased, the focus is increased. I think our team is fresh right now. If we had to, we could continue to play for a few more weeks. But that just shows you the experience, the maturity, the depth that we have. And I think that’s all important.”
In the first few years of the four-team CFP, the prominent coaching voices at the time — Urban Meyer, Dabo Swinney and Nick Saban, most notably — talked quite a bit about the physical toll it took on their team to play a semifinal against a quality opponent and then come back roughly 10 days later for a championship game.
That led to a natural question: If you expand the playoff and make teams play at least one, or maybe two more games, how much of a roster will they have left by the end?
Well, we’re already seeing the price teams can pay through the long run of a postseason. Notre Dame lost defensive lineman Rylie Mills to a knee injury in the first round against Indiana, tight end Cooper Flanagan to an Achilles injury in the quarterfinals against Georgia and offensive tackle Anthonie Knapp to an ankle injury against Penn State.
None of the three will play against Ohio State, and other Fighting Irish players like running back Jeremiyah Love have played through injuries but been compromised to some degree. The health of Notre Dame’s roster is one of the biggest storylines entering the championship game and a huge reason the Irish are more than a touchdown underdog to Ohio State.
“It’s been harder to manage because we have so many guys out,” Irish defensive coordinator Al Golden said. “What we’ve learned during this journey is how deep you have to be in college football right now to get to this point. We’ve had a lot of guys step up, or we’re not where we are right now.”
Depth has been a buzzword this season in college football, largely within the context of the transfer portal and how many of the traditional powers like Alabama and Georgia have lacked the kind of roster depth they possessed at their peak. It has made the margins smaller, and arguably increased the postseason luck factor compared to previous years when teams in the College Football Playoff or the Bowl Championship Series had three or four weeks after the regular season to heal their bumps and bruises.
Now, it’s a war of attrition. And it’s something every coach, and every training staff, has to monitor on a daily basis.
“We prepared of this, this offseason and this summer, understanding that this was a possibility,” Notre Dame linebacker Jack Kiser said. “Our strength staff and our performance staff has really been able to incorporate the sports science part of it, and then the coaching staff understanding what we need as players and how we can make sure everybody’s feeling great by game day, that’s what is most important. And I think we’ve done an amazing job to be able to make sure everybody’s at their peak when it matters.”
Notre Dame is closely attuned to all the monitoring technology its players wear during games and practices, measuring their exertion and workload, and formulates individual practice plans around whether its players need to ramp up or back off.
Mike Denbrock, the offensive coordinator, said there are certain days where he gets a report that certain players just can’t practice as much because of how careful Notre Dame has been in keeping their bodies fresh.
“It makes me tired just thinking about (playing 16 games),” he said. “Fortunately we’ve got a lot of people smarter than me making those decisions. But it alters how you practice, how you approach the physicality of what you do towards the end of the season. You can’t be quite as physical as it was maybe in the beginning, but you have to be able to balance the work that you need. It’s a little bit of a challenge, but we’ve got really smart kids and they understand what they’re after.”
One thing’s for sure, though: This first year of the 12-team CFP is going to provide a data set and a blueprint that all of college football is going to study. Prior to 2006, the college season was just 11 games plus a conference championship for some (not all) leagues and one postseason game. Now it’s 12 in the regular season, plus a conference championship, plus three or four playoff games.
That’s a huge difference in a relatively short span of time, in an era where it’s extremely difficult to stockpile talent due to the lack of transfer restrictions. And those who navigate it best are going to end up playing for championships.
“The length of the season has changed,” Oho State offensive coordinator Chip Kelly said. “When I was at Oregon, you had the regular season and a bowl game and we had 37 days off. That’s an entirely different thing. The whole landscape of the schedule has had an impact on what we did on both sides of the ball. That’s been on the forefront of our strength and conditioning, our nutrition program, how our offense plays, how our defense plays. It’s an overall program decision – how do you handle this length of the season? It hasn’t been done before.”