ARLINGTON, Texas – On Friday morning, we posted our Ten Pressing Questions for Ohio State’s Cotton Bowl match-up with Texas.
It was a thrilling game with the No. 8 seed Ohio State scoring a pair of touchdowns in the final eight minutes on its way to a 28-14 win over No. 5 seed Texas. The win propels OSU (13-2) in the CFB Playoff national championship game against No. 7 seed Notre Dame (14-1) on Mon., Jan. 20, at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
Below, we will share the answers to these questions. Here we go:
1. WILL BUCKEYE NATION SHOW OUT?
We Asked: Will Texas have a true homefield advantage?
The Answer: So I spent a good portion of this game working on my computer in the digital work room deep in the bowels of palatial AT&T Stadium. The TVs were on about a 20 second delay, so I would hear a roar in the distance and then see a meaningful play pop up on the screen.
The Texas roars were roughly double of the Ohio State roars, just by my estimation. I would say it was a solid 65/35 edge for Texas fans in this game, and that does make sense because we were in Dallas and just 175 miles from the Texas campus in Austin.
And I think the crowd did have an impact. It got loud a few times when OSU had the ball and, as we feared, there were some presnap penalties that hamstrung the Buckeyes at times. OSU’s offensive penalties in general were a borderline epidemic that probably hampered at least five possessions. Some of those were rooted in OSU’s inability to communicate at times it seemed.