Opinion: Cincinnati barbarians are at the gate of the College Football Playoff. Let them in
CINCINNATI — The instant the game ended, the fans poured on to the Nippert Stadium turf. From the press box way up high, they resembled ants atop a picnic table, chowing down on a chunk of forgotten cookie. And they just kept coming. The record will show that 37,978 people attended the American Conference football championship game. Eyeballs suggest 35,000 of ‘em found their way to the field after it was over.
Cincinnati won something. We actually won something. The Queen City has been remarkably short of crowns for a very long time. The losing infects how we see ourselves. It makes us more cynical than we should be.
There was no cynicism Saturday night at a little before 8, on the field at Nippert Stadium. A tribal joy occupied the place. UC beat visiting Houston, 35-20, to win the AAC title, finish the regular season unbeaten and, perhaps, clinch a spot in the playoffs. It’s a very loud perhaps. Loud and boisterous and fortified by the conviction that UC has done all it can do to please the playoff committee.
UC’s long and arduous audition is over. The Bearcats have spent the last couple months in an extended beauty contest, in which they were the only participants. Alabama could spend the season wearing striped ties with striped shirts, and it didn’t seem to be matter. The Crimson Tide’s pedigree was assumed.
Georgia was beyond reproach, but everyone else with a marquee name – Ohio State, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Oregon – had to play their way out of the playoffs. UC had to play its way in. The Bearcats still do. No one around here will quite believe the playoff committee until the playoff committee does its (over)due diligence and ESPN announces "the University of Cincinnati" Sunday at noon, for its appointed spot in the football final four.
The Bearcats won a conference championship in convincing fashion, over the 21st-ranked Cougars. They have earned this presumptive national title shot, in a way no other non-“power’’ program ever has. For two months, the Bearcats were competing against twin sets of expectations – theirs and everyone else’s – that might have broken lesser teams.
Even on Saturday, they played careful, even tentative, football in the first half. It seemed as if they wanted to win, but no more than they wanted not to trip over their shoes. What would the committee think? They needed one spark to catch fire. It came in the person of Joel Dublanko, a grad student linebacker. He picked off a Clayton Tune pass that the offense quickly converted into a TD. "I saw the QBs eyes." Dublanko recalled. The ball "went in my hands, stayed in my hands and I was like, crap, I have the football right now. I ran, I protected it and the rest is history."
Suddenly the lid was off. The Bearcats looked liberated and played like it. Two more TDs in the next five minutes and the style-points route was on.
"Carrying the torch for the not-bluebloods of the world. That’s a lot," Fickell said. "We want to be us, not get into the expectations of everybody else. (Not) trying to live up and be what somebody else wants you to be. We know being us is good enough."
They beat a team that hadn’t lost in three months. A ranked team with the third-best pass defense in the nation and a quarterback who’d thrown 19 TD passes and two interceptions in his previous seven games. So the question hangs from the ceiling like confetti waiting to be dropped:
Was that good enough?
Barta and Barnhart, Corrigan and Cobb: What say you? Will Willingham, former head coach at Stanford, Notre Dame and Washington, who knows some things about college football excellence, give the Bearcats a bounce?
The Cincinnati barbarians are at the gates, arriving at the debutante ball in their best high-heeled sneakers and a dab of mustard on their sleeve. Dare you let them in?
"If it’s meant to be, it will be," Fickell decided.
Someone made the mistake of asking Fickell about the “resounding statement’’ his team had just made for the committee. Fickell’s not much into statements. “The resounding statement is what you just saw. What that team did in the third quarter is who we are. If that’s not good enough, we’re gonna take our ball and go someplace else, I guess,’’ he said.
Fickell said he probably won’t watch the selection show Sunday at noon. It conflicts with a senior appreciation banquet that happens between noon and 2. Achievement can be its own reward. It doesn’t always require outside affirmation.
Meantime, the fans stayed on the Nippert Stadium turf a good long while. It was a very good place to be.
Follow Paul Daugherty on Twitter @EnquirerDoc