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ESPN's FPI Predicts Ohio State National Championship Appearance

Who will be playing for the college football national championship? ESPN predicts that the Ohio State Buckeyes will be one of the two teams.

How will the Ohio State Buckeyes fare in 2023? Will they make it back to the national championship for the first time since 2020? 

According to ESPN's computer model, the Football Power Index (FPI), the Buckeyes are the preseason favorites to make the national championship and win it. The rankings released back in April have seemingly already handed out their prediction for who will be the last two teams standing on the second Monday of January. 

ESPN's FPI predicts Ohio State and Alabama will face each other in NRG Stadium for the national title. These two programs have become very familiar in the last decade. The Buckeyes have faced Nick Saban's Crimson Tide twice since 2015. 

Obviously, Buckeye fans don't have good memories of the last time these two historic programs went head-to-head in the 2020 national championship game as Alabama rolled to a 52-24 victory. 

That merely evened the score after the Buckeyes got the better of Alabama in the 2015 Sugar Bowl in a college football playoff semifinal as Ohio State beat the Crimson Tide 42-35 en route to a national championship. 

If these two teams were to meet again, it would be an intriguing matchup as both will start new quarterbacks this fall. Neither of which has yet decided on who that will be. Yet if the Buckeyes are to make it to the title game, it will likely largely be due to their offense which features arguably the best wide receiving corps in the country. 


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