I’m heading to the ‘Shoe here in a minute to see the game in person (yay for lame Alumni Tickets!) but am planning on watching the rest of the slate of games when I get back. I’ve got the in-game chat embedded after the jump.

Feel free to drop a note in the comments on any of the games today, or anything else that’s on your mind.

[Read more…]

I wonder what it’s like to be a football player at a school like New Mexico State. New Mexico isn’t exactly a hotbed of high school football (a good friend of mine told me some interesting stories of his days on his high school football in the middle-of-nowhere New Mexico. They were passionate but not necessarily talented). So you’re not exactly the cream of the crop. But at the same time, you are playing division 1A football and you are living the dream, whether you win or not. Still, it can’t be fun playing on a bad team gearing up to play one of the best programs in the country.

Lambs to the slaughter.

I used to scoff at ranking schools on an academic scale. I went to Ohio State to study electrical engineering and always laughed at the idea that someone’s education at, say, MIT, could be any better than what I was getting. I mean seriously, were they learning nuances of Ohm’s Law that we didn’t get? I’m pretty sure there wasn’t much left to interpretation. Same goes for pretty much everything else. Math and physics are pretty much set in stone. They weren’t operating under a different set of assumptions. The equations are the same on OSU graph paper as on MIT’s graph paper. But while Ohio State’s EE department was ranked in the top 30, MIT was consistently one or two. I didn’t get it.

Then, I went to my first academic conference where a lot of the presentations were done by MIT and then later I interviewed at Lincoln Labs at MIT it became clear what the difference was. It wasn’t one single thing, either. It was a combination of the people, the opportunities, but more than anything, it was the facilities. Some of the things we had in our labs were twenty year hand-me-downs while MIT had bleeding edge equipment. It was suddenly all very clear.

All that is to say that Ohio State is college football’s MIT. It’s on a different level. New Mexico State is not a very good team. They don’t have the facilities that Ohio State has at its disposal. They don’t have top athletes. Things come easy to OSU. New Mexico State has to fight for everything it has (which isn’t much).

So there’s no breakdown, no match-ups, no hidden strategies. This is a straight-forward game where Ohio State will dominate New Mexico State with extreme prejudice in every facet of the game. We’ve already looked at the statistics. This is a tune-up, a walk through. This isn’t even a scrimmage. This is a massacre.

Vegas is giving New Mexico State 44 points. I have no idea what to even propose for predictions. And since we’re gearing up for three intriguing games to close the season (with some really cool give-aways to boot) that for this week, we’ll just ask for your predictions for the final score. And how much time is left in the third quarter when Joe Bauserman plays.

el Kaiser’s predictions:
OSU: 42 NMSU: 0
Bauserman comes in at the 8-minute mark of the third quarter and leads two scoring drives.

sportsMonkey’s predictions:
OSU: 52 NMSU: 3
Defense plays well enough for a shutout but is likely to be betrayed again by the offense turning the ball over in their own red zone. Pryor will play through the 3rd, and perhaps even a series in the 4th if the Bucks have the ball at the start of the quarter. High points because I think the defense and/or special teams will score (or at least set up several scores on short drives).

Yes, Virginia, this could get ugly.

That 72% Red Zone conversion sticks in my craw something fierce. Other thoughts?

2012 Heisman Hopeful?

One game does not cure what ails this football team, nor does it answer every question we had going into this week’s game. Minnesota’s defense was one of the more terrible defenses (on paper and on the field) in the Big Ten.

That qualifier being said, this was a pretty solid win. Miscues in the first half had most Buckeye fans still feeling like we were stuck in neutral, but the second half put those thoughts to rest. The offense looked fluid, we were moving the ball on the ground and through the air and Jermil Martin was a revelation. So yeah, the positives outweighed the negatives. 509 yards of offense and only giving up 286 yards on defense will do that for you.

We’ll have a more thorough look back at the game shortly (brought to you by the newest member of the MotSaG team) but for now, we’ll hope whatever ails Brandon Saine is short-lived and we’ll enjoy the victory.

This week in statistical match-ups. Maybe I should call this “On Paper.” As in, On Paper, there should be no way Ohio State loses.

Again, I present this with minimal commentary. The only thing I will mention today is that 75% scoring in the Red Zone is borderline inexcusable.