Archives for December 2013

Ohio State will be taking on the Fighting Irish in the annual Gotham Classic at Madison Square Garden. The game till tip off at 7:30 PM and will be televised. The Buckeyes are coming into the game ranked 3rd in country with a record of 11-0. This is one of their final non conference games and there are many things Buckeye fans are questioning about the team. Our last away game was at a not so great Marquette team. This is only the second time the Buckeyes take the road for a game. But, this is a neutral site which will most likely be filled with Ohio State fans. Notre Dame is coming into this game 8-3. I believe this will not be an easy win for the Buckeyes. Last year Temple had an upset over Syracuse in the premiere game of the Gotham Classic.

Notre Dame is lead by senior guard Jerian Grant averaging a little over 19 points per game. They are also lead by senior center Garrick Sherman who averages a little over 14 points a game and a little over 7 rebounds a game. This will not be a breeze for Amir and Trey. Notre Dame has three loses. Two loses to teams that don’t have a high prestige. Their other lose comes from a ranked Iowa. I think this is one of the Buckeye’s hardest games played so far in the season.

Ohio State is looking to fix out the little flaws before heading into conference play. They came out very slow against Delaware. I think Ohio State will come out firing with the excitement of playing on the big stage at MSG. Ohio State fans a looking for a little more offense out of Laquinton Ross. He is the guy that can put up big numbers for OSU. Craft and Scott should be able to shutdown the back court for ND. If Amir and Trey hold up in the paint it will all work out for Ohio State.

The Garden hold a lot of history in sports. I am sure both teams will be coming out playing at full force. This will be a interesting game to watch. I will be at the game and am hoping to see a lot of Buckeye fans!

In a new report out from the guys at FootballScoop.Com it appears that Everett Withers will be named the next Head Coach of the James Madison Football team…

Here are the details from their report…

James Madison: Sources tell us that Everett Withers will be the next head coach at James Madison. Withers has spent the past two years at Ohio State as the assistant head coach / co-defensive coordinator, and prior to that was the defensive coordinator at North Carolina for four seasons. Withers served as the interim head coach at UNC during the 2011 season (going 7-5) after Butch Davis was let go.

Coach Withers has been with the team since Urban Meyer took over as head coach. He has been an Asst Head Coach/Co-Defensive Coordinator/ Safeties coach his entire 2 years at OSU. He is a ver good recruiter handling the North Carolina/Maryland/Virginia areas for OSU. We should know very soon if this report is accurate but they have a great track record of getting things correct.

Bowl Season starts this Saturday, and I know you’re all psyched to pretend you might watch Louisiana-Lafayette play Tulane. But be honest, if I told you they’ve played twice already this year, you wouldn’t know for sure if that’s true or not.

Saturday
2:00p

New Mexico Bowl: Colorado State vs. Washington State. The Rams take on the Cougars for the first time ever. I don’t know if this is the cover of the game program, but it should be. Combined, these two teams give up nearly 900 yards per game. Bowls! (ESPN)

3:30p

Las Vegas Bowl: Fresno State vs. USC. Believe it or not, this game will serve as the rubber match for a series that includes a 1992 Bulldog win in the Freedom Bowl and a 2005 Trojan win. Here is a picture of a Trojan Bulldog (or, if the file name is to be believed, a Spartan Bulldog). Why? (ABC)

5:30p

Idaho Potato Bowl: Buffalo vs. San Diego State. The Bulls and the Aztecs have never played each other, but they did both play Ohio State this year. Watch our first two opponents battle it out for a trophy that I hope is shaped like this. Yum! (ESPN)

9:00p

New Orleans Bowl: Louisiana-Lafayette vs. Tulane. At least the Ragin’ Cajuns and Green Wave know how to come up with original team names. No tigers or wildcats here. But that also means no weird mashup pic from Google Image Search. I did, however, find that Cajun Wave is a defunct barbecue restaurant in Stowell, Texas, just down the street from Winnie Church of Christ, which probably doesn’t have anything to do with these folks, but I’m pretending it does. (ESPN)

Monday
2:00p

St. Petersburg Bowl: East Carolina vs. Ohio. The Pirates already have two victories over the Bobcats from the late ’90s when the school was transitioning from independence to Conference USA. If you’re going to the game, print out this handy map of Metro routes and don’t get Volkovskaya confused with Moskovskaya. (ESPN)

Tuesday
8:00p

Hawaii Bowl: Boise State vs. Oregon State. The Broncos lead this series 3-2, but all of those games happened in September in that weird northwestern part of the United States. This is in Hawaii, in what would be December if they had that in Hawaii. (ESPN)

Recruiting is big business there is no doubt about that. There are four major recruiting services out there right now. Some are really good (247sports) and some really awful (ESPN). The middle 2 services Rivals and Scout are basically the same sometimes good and sometimes bad. We here at MotSaG try to stay neutral in which site we use but I will admit I favor towards 247sports big time because they had the mindset early on to take all 4 sites rankings and avg. them out to give us a industry wide ranking system known as the composite rankings. Today I wanted to take a look at the newest rankings release this one by Scout.com. They have released their newest Top 300 players in the country and it is littered with Ohio State commits. So lets look at where each future Buckeye has been placed in the list and those on the outside looking in then we will discuss the ranking list to point out some things that stood out to me.

SCOUT 300

#33 Sam Hubbard- 5 star OLB

#39 Damon Webb- 4 star CB

#53 Raekwon McMillan- 4 star MLB

#61 Jamarco Jones- 4 star OT

#68 Kyle Berger- 4 star OLB

#76 Curtis Samuels- 4 star WR

#81 Dante Booker- 4 star OLB

#82 Parris Campbell Jr- 4 star RB

#109 Jalyn Holmes- 4 star DE

#113 Demetrius Knox- 4 star OG

#125 Noah Brown- 4 star WR

#151 Johnnie Dixon- 4 star WR

#240 Terry Mclaurin- 4 star WR

#254 Malik Hooker- 4 star WR

#281 Kyle Trout- 4 star OT

Non-Ranked commits

Dylan Thompson- 3 star DE

Marcelys Jones- 3 star OG

Sean Nuernberger- 3 star K

Stephen Collier- 3 star QB

Uncommitted OSU targets

#21 Solomon Thomas- 5 star DE

#43 Malik McDowell- 4 star DE

#45 Marshon Lattimore- 4 star CB

#67 Erick Smith- 4 star S

#83 Derek Nnadi- 4 star DT

– Of the 19 commits in the 2014 class 15 of them are ranked in the new Scout 300.

– Sam Hubbard is the only 5 star of the 19 members. This is his highest ranking of any of the 4 services by far. I am surprised they have him this high. Not that he isnt good enough just surprised he is the highest ranked OSU commit on the list.

– Based on this rankings the Linebacker, Wide Receiver, and Offensive Lineman classes are stacked for this year. Filling major needs for Coach Meyer and his team.

– The four unranked commits I still think are undervalued. Stephen Collier is a 4 star all day everyday in my opinion. Dylan Thompson and Marcelys Jones both should be 4 stars as well IMO. Not going to lie about the kicker yes he is good but he is just a kicker lol.

– There are somewhere between 4-6 spots left available in this class depending how things shake out with the NFL and transfers. The 6 guys I listed under uncommitted targets will fill most of those spots improving this class even more.

– Also should be noted that TTUN has only 8 members of their class in the Scout 300. OSU has nearly doubel that amount at 15. The 15 total Future Buckeyes on the Scout 300 nearly matches the entire class for TTUN who has 16 members of their class.

– This is of course just one of the four recruiting services opinions but it is very telling just how good this 2014 OSU class really is. Coach Meyer and his staff is putting together another stellar class and is building depth at positions where we are lacking it right now. This class has the potential to be one of the best ever in OSU history and we will look back on it in 5 years to see how they panned out.

As you know, I like to predict things–often with little to no substantiation. I get away with this baseless speculation because I do it for free. If I were some professional working for, say, ESPN, I would be held accountable for my prog–what? No one holds them to any sort of standard either? Huh.

But I’m not one to sweep my failures under the rug, so let’s take a look at some things I predicted this year, and how they turned out (so far):

B1G Newbies:

Back in February, I took a shot at guessing how the two new conference head coaches would fare in their opening season. I thought Wisconsin would take a small step back under Gary Andersen and go 6-6. Instead, they went 9-3 and one of those was the Arizona State loss where what should have been a last-second Badger field goal attempt disintegrated into mass confusion thanks to probably the worst performance by officials ever. That was one of the losses I picked, though, so there’s that. I also correctly picked the Ohio State and Penn State losses.

On the other side of that coin is Purdue’s Darrell Hazell, who I thought would go 4-8. Instead, the Boilermakers won a single game, against Indiana State. Obviously, I had them winning that game too, but also thought they’d handle Northern Illinois, Regular Illinois and Indiana–games they lost by a combined 55 points.

Fraud Teams:

Faring much better was my annual Fraud list of teams that were undefeated after five weeks only to lose at least five games the rest of the season. Missouri and Houston managed to get themselves off the list by the Week 11 update, and of the six remaining teams, four have already lost their fifth game and Washington needs to beat BYU next Friday to avoid going full Fraud this year. The only team that won’t hit five losses is UCLA, who was almost left off the update. All in all, a pretty successful year for the Fraud List.