As the new College Football Playoff finds, it can be hard to elude the duds

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Very few words convey their meaning as efficiently as does “dud,” and the yeoman word “dud” started flexing its stout little bicep on Friday night when an ESPN play-by-play broadcaster proclaimed that the first of four College Football Playoff games had been “a little bit of a dud.”

If “dud” refers to an objective lack of suspense, as in that case, then duds soon swarmed the weekend until the first 12-team playoff had commenced either with four duds or with three duds and one near-dud. Oddly the near-dud, which also might have been a dud in certain astute viewpoints, came in the game most had presumed beforehand as bound to become a dud: Texas vs. Clemson.

In Texas’s 38-24 win, Clemson might have benefited from the little notch of letup involved in a dud when it climbed from a 31-10 deficit to a 31-24 mild curiosity early in the fourth quarter. Two plays from scrimmage after it did that, Texas had stretched its advantage to the final margin on Jaydon Blue’s 77-yard run, which restored to the game its dud-hood, before Clemson went on a journey to the Texas 1-yard line, before a fourth-down stop with 7:24 left. That made dud-hood mildly debatable, and left the weekend with Notre Dame’s 27-17 dud over Indiana that stood at 27-3 with four minutes left, Penn State’s 38-10 dud over SMU that stood at 38-3 with three minutes left, Texas’s dud or near-dud over Clemson, and Ohio State’s 42-17 dud over Tennessee that stood at 42-10 with three minutes left and served as a competitive dud even as Ohio State played gorgeously. Spectators might have snoozed in the stands all around were it not for the cold, and maybe somebody snoozed in Austin whether through boredom or some other agent.

It became the second straight playoff concept to wrestle with the specter of duds. It can go forgotten except to real lunatics that the four-team method that ran for the 10 seasons between 2014 and 2023 cranked out quite some duds. Thirteen of the 20 semifinals it staged tilted into the dud zone, and it took the thing a while to shake the dud habit given that 13 of the first 16 achieved dud-ness before all of the last four semifinals in 2022-23 and 2023-24 achieved non-dud-ness. Viable contenders for the dud of all duds included Alabama’s 38-0 win over Michigan State in 2015-16, Clemson’s 30-3 win over Notre Dame in 2018-19 and Georgia’s 34-11 win over Michigan in 2021-22. A dud such as LSU’s 63-28 win over Oklahoma in 2019-20 at least counted as a pretty dud because it had LSU’s aurora borealis offense in it, yet it remained a dud.

A dud is not a tragic event in general even as some might wail it so, and the new playoff’s dud rich outset doesn’t really reflect on anything or anyone or any committee. As the wise adage goes, it’s fallacy to use outcomes of games to impugn somebody’s rankings or seedings when those outcomes remained in the future at the time of those rankings or seedings. These opening duds just … were. The fresh wrinkle of on-campus playoff games did seem a hit, especially in Columbus, where Tennessee fans gobbled up enough tickets that they changed the tenor and color of both the city and the stadium.

Yet somehow, in a sport that spent the regular season gone by with shouting hints of a strange parity it long had lacked, and with a new playoff format designed for more openness, the opening weekend went to four old-money, big-money kingdoms: Notre Dame at home, Penn State at home, Texas at home and Ohio State at home. They went to Notre Dame with a yardage lead of 394-278 (with 135 of Indiana’s yards coming on two window-dressing late drives), Penn State at 325-253, Texas at 494-412 (near-dud numbers) and Ohio State at 473-256 (with 73 of Tennessee’s yards coming on one window-dressing late drive). Each of the four kingdoms clearly controlled its game, with the decisiveness particularly aching in the games that invited enchanting fresh faces - Indiana and SMU - and then dispensed what seem the same age-old kinds of results, plus the kind of snobbery that follows. All four games became the kind of line-of-scrimmage duds wherein one side outmuscles the other. And if Clemson, that recent two-time national champion and seven-time playoff qualifier, got perceived as among the little guys given how it squeezed into the field in the last second, well, Texas roamed the field largely as it pleased, with 289 yards in the first half.

A season funky enough that Alabama had three losses gave way to an anticipated weekend that dispensed a big sigh of chalk. For any demonstration of what has happened in the sport, of the parity born from a transfer portal that TCU Coach Sonny Dykes said would start to proliferate when his team reached the 2022-23 final, littler guys like Boise State and Arizona State await. Boise State will play Penn State in the Fiesta Bowl quarterfinal on Dec. 31, while Arizona State will play Texas in the Peach Bowl quarterfinal on Jan. 1. If those two underdogs fizzle, as many will project they will, then the first tournament will go without any kind of March Madness storylines, and those in charge might revisit the format that tilts such seeding weight toward conference championships.

Yet as the first weekend of this new habit got past midnight on Saturday in cold Columbus, anticipation started anew, and some Buckeyes spoke of the commotion up ahead as they head for the Rose Bowl opposite Oregon in the starlet of the quarterfinals. Said defensive end Jack Sawyer, “It is a new season, a new season every week. It’s win or go home. It’s the NFL playoffs now.” Said offensive coordinator Chip Kelly, “We’ve got a chance here,” and he spoke by heart the date Jan. 20, which will bring the championship game in Atlanta. Said quarterback Will Howard, who closed Ohio State’s first game with Oregon with a scoring chance that didn’t work out, “A heck of an opportunity for all of us. The way that last one ended doesn’t sit right with me. Still doesn’t. It still bugs me.”

They all looked forward to a non-dud, even as non-duds can prove hard to come by in life.

Chuck Culpepper covers national college sports as well as some tennis, golf and international sports for The Washington Post. He wrote previously for Sports On Earth/USA Today, The National (Abu Dhabi), the Los Angeles Times (while London-based), Newsday, the Oregonian, the Lexington Herald-Leader and, from age 14, the Suffolk Sun/Virginian-Pilot.