Ohio State Aims for Unprecedented 15-0 Championship

Ohio State claims eight national championship teams in its storied history, and if you believe that then you also believe a good story.

And by story, that means, tall tale.

Not that OSU is the most egregious offender in this category of puffed-up career resumes -- we see you, two-loss, 1941 Alabama, shut out in both defeats -- but that's what's so great about the College Football Playoff.

The winner requires no massaging, no re-purposing, no we-were-the-champs-before-the-bowls, yeah-but-we-were-No. 1-in-one-obscure-poll arguments or addendums.

The winner is the winner, and this year it will be LSU, Ohio State, Clemson or Oklahoma.

If the Buckeyes (13-0) get past Clemson, the reigning national champion and winners of 28 straight games, on Dec. 28 in a Playoff semifinal at the Fiesta Bowl, they'll then have the chance to legitimize a claim to being the greatest team in school history on Jan. 13 in New Orleans against the LSU-Oklahoma winner.

There's nothing legitimate about OSU's claim on the 1970 national championship from the Football Writers Association of America, seeing how the No. 1 Buckeyes got clobbered by heavy-underdog Stanford in the Rose Bowl.

That marked the second time in a decade the FWAA went contrarian and picked Ohio State as its national champ without Woody Hayes club winning a bowl game.

The other occurred in 1961, when a faculty vote denied the 9-1 Buckeyes a trip to the Rose Bowl in the same season Alabama finished 11-0.

Not only did he lead @OhioStateFB to an undefeated regular season and a B1G Championship, but @ryandaytime, in his first year as a head coach, also had to deal with the pressure of replacing an icon in Urban Meyer. For that he’s my coach of the year. pic.twitter.com/itPGSUrY5Q
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This would therefore be Ohio State's seventh unimpeachable national championship, and second of the Playoff era, matching Clemson (2018, 2016) and Alabama (2015, 2017).

Those three programs would have consumed all six titles in Playoff history and Ohio State would be the only one not to suffer a loss in the championship game.

We'll leave it to you to determine if it's better to get to the national championship game and lose or better to not get there and suffer a broken heart.

OSU coach Ryan Day would become the first coach to win a championship in his first season since Larry Coker with Miami in 2001.

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— Ohio State Football (@OhioStateFB) December 17, 2019

While the idea has lingered in the backs of the Buckeyes' minds since they began caving in every opponent they played, Day never brought it up to them until now.

"We didn’t want to get ourselves too far ahead," he said. "That is going to be part of the message, though, that if you want to be known as one of the best of all time, be up there with the national champs, you want to be in rare air, here we go, this is the push right here.

"Yeah, that will be part of the message. Not that it really matters with our day-to-day operation. We’re not going to be trying harder or anything else like that. We just got to do a great job of focusing day in, day out, maximizing each day as we can so we’re prepared on the 28th."

No Ohio State team has ever played 15 games, so a 15-0 mark would be a new frontier, one better than Jim Tressel's 14-0 champions in the BCS Era, which was pre-Big Ten title game.

"The first thing is you have to believe, you have to believe that you belong as national champs," Day said. "You go from there.

"Our preparation doesn’t need to change in terms of what we’ve done to this point. We don’t need guys to do extraordinary things. We need them to continue what they’re doing.

"The most important thing, at any cost, whatever it takes to win, you do. Everybody has to be willing to do whatever it takes. Selfishness can’t be in the way at this point. I mean, it has to be everybody on board doing everything they can to win every play. You talk about every yard mattering, every first down mattering, every series mattering, that’s going to be the case here.

"All hands on deck. We got to be really efficient. We have to believe we can win the whole thing."

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