It’s not like Woody Hayes would have recognized the first College Football Playoff national champions.

Certainly no 3 yards and a cloud of dust for This Particular Ohio State. Just a trail of duck feathers.

Oh, the Buckeyes run plenty of fancy ball plays. And they can spread it out with anybody.

But in some ways it was refreshing, maybe reassuring, to watch Ohio State bludgeon the sleek and trendy Oregon Ducks Monday night.

Sure, the Buckeyes had the dangdest hybrid of a third-string quarterback/beast possibly in the history of college football.

Now, supposedly, there is talk Cardale Jones may pronounce himself NFL-ready after three college games — games, not years.

And Ohio State had, for all we were told from afar, maybe the third-best running back in the Big Ten with Ezekiel Elliott.

Those were the headliners at least, and great stories they were.

But mostly the Buckeyes went to the most futuristic stadium on the planet and destroyed the new-age, slick-dressing Ducks in the most old-fashioned way possible.

They beat them up, from start to finish, mostly down in what passes for the trenches in AT&T Stadium’s state-of-the-art turf.

For the most part, it was about as sleek and complicated as a good, solid hammer and tongs.

You didn’t need a video screen as big as a football field to see it.

The Buckeyes lined up and ground the Ducks into goose liver paté.

But there was a lesson here somewhere, and it starts, like football always has, with taking control of the line of scrimmage.

Run over them. Wait for them to stand up. Run over them again. Or explode through gaping holes.

You can even huddle it between plays.

There was plenty of passing, lots of Buckeyes as Frisbee-catching dogs.

But basically the mismatch was up front, where it’s always been.

Ohio State’s Urban Meyer may be tough to warm up to. Down in SEC country, the Buckeyes were always the Yankee team the South hated the most.

But the championship game victory struck a blow for traditionalists everywhere.

It’s not an archaic offense by any means. Meyer was an early proponent of the read-option spread.

But it still incorporates old-school values, field position, ball control and, yes, even an occasional huddle.

Somewhere Monday night Nick Saban was surely wondering if maybe he didn’t give his radical offensive coordinator, Lane Kiffin, too much rope in his own game with the Buckeyes.

Maybe there’s still something to be said for lining up and imposing your will on an opponent.

Oregon was the present and surely the future, the Nike-funded, in-your-face peek into what football will become when all the old barriers are broken down.

But Ohio State was way too big of a barrier — an old-school barrier — even for the poster child for the beep-beep, hurry-up, non-stop offensive attacks that are taking over the game.

You still need to win the battles up front.

Maybe Nike needs to spend a little less money on imported Brazilian ipe wood floors in the team leisure rooms and a little more for cast-iron barbells in the weight room.

Times must be tough, though. Oregon evidently couldn’t afford to use any of its personal school colors for its uniforms in the biggest game in school history.

But that was a sideshow.

The Ducks, for all their advances in offensive chicanery, were still as soft up front as when LSU ran circles around them in the same venue to open the 2011 season.

And, if Monday night was any indication, that still matters.

Maybe it works in the Pac-12.

But why didn’t we see this coming?

You didn’t even have to wait for the ball to be snapped.

You didn’t even have to wait for the seminal moments when the Buckeyes quarterback — granted, not your everyday quarterback specimen ­— kept running over defensive nose tackles one on one.

Not glancing blows or leveraged slide-bys.

The quarterback was getting head-on shots with defensive linemen and knocking them into next month.

Once they lined up you could see it coming.

To the eye test, Oregon’s defensive front looked small, a bit pudgy, mostly overwhelmed and often helpless.

Ohio State’s offensive line was full-grown men.

Same thing when the SEC-style defensive front lined up against the Ducks’ whiz-bang offense.

It’s a sight to behold when it’s clicking, wearing teams down by treating every series like it’s a fire drill.

But evidently, that offense is allergic to second-and-9. Then it gets flustered, frustrated.

You can scheme and hurry up all day, but you still have to win some battles up front.

The hurry-up, no-huddle spreads aren’t going anywhere.

But, for a night anyway, it was nice to some basic rules of football nature still apply.

l

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

shobbs@americanpress.com

Sophomore John Findley stands outside the Woody Hayes Athletic Center as players arrive on The Ohio State University campus Tuesday

Tony Dejak