Once.

Only once in Jim Tressel’s career has he lost two games in a row (during the 2004 season, if you’re wondering). Unless you’re the type to have spent the week poking your Pryor doll in the shoulder with pins, you’re probably not expecting that stat to be duplicated.

The fact is that Pryor is not as terrible as we scapegoat-hunters would have you believe. Don’t mis-quote me on that – Pryor obviously has issues – but it’s much too early to assume that he’s a lost cause. One has only to look at Vince Young to see what rewards patience might bring.

Their stats are eerily similar:

For those wondering whether Pryor could turn the corner and achieve greatness someday, look at the huge jump that Young made in his third season.

Of course, similarity in one year does not guarantee similarity in later years. And there are some apples-to-oranges comparisons of the Texas and OSU coaching staffs, offensive lines, etc. I’m not predicting that Pryor will be another college football legend like Vince Young, I’m only pointing out that he very well could be someday. And OSU fans should note that they probably won’t find a Texas fan that isn’t glad Mack Brown stuck with Young, even when the Texas offense was crumbling and inconsistent.

Still don’t believe me? Read this recap of a Texas loss, also humiliating, also halfway through VY’s second season, and compare the similarities with the last weekend’s Ohio State game.

If you’re still looking for a scapegoat for Pryor’s slow development, then it should start with Tressel and flow down to OSU quarterbacks coach Nick Siciliano. When QB coach Joe Daniels moved on last year, Tressel gave the job to Siciliano, a loyal assistant from his Youngstown State days. At the time of his promotion, Siciliano’s position with OSU was listed as “Offensive Quality Control,” which is nothing more than a glorified film room assistant.

In case you missed that, they essentially put the team’s A/V club president in complete charge of developing the #1 recruit in the country. Are we shocked that Pryor’s struggling? Grab your torch & pitchforks, boys.

But what does all this have to do with Minnesota? Nothing.

This week’s questions:

• How many turnovers does Pryor account for this week?
• What is the fewest number of points the offense will have to score for you to be encouraged that solid progress is being made? (Consider that Minny’s giving up 23 points per game)
• How many officials will the SEC suspend next week for continuing to ensure Tebow victories?
• Penn State vs. Michigan?

sportsMonkey’s predictions:
Pryor’s TOs: One (thinking positive)
# of offensive points: 63
SEC officials suspended: The remainder, as the SEC will soon announce that Tebow himself will be making all the calls for the remainder of the 2009 season
PSU vs UM: Going with the upset – UM.

el Kaiser’s predictions:
Pryor’s TOs: One (thinking really positive)
# of offensive points: I’m torn here. Less than four touchdowns will mean to me that the offense isn’t progressing. But I think anything less than 40 points and I won’t feel sated. But I know we’ll win this game 17-7 and everything will not be honky-dory.
SEC officials suspended: The SEC is going to install “Tebow Sessions” with the refs. Just five minutes with the guy will make them all better (at their jobs) men.
PSU vs UM: Michigan shocks the world and Penn State fans melt the internet down. Their tears are going to be so delicious.

ESPN is reporting that Beanie Wells has declared his intention to join the NFL draft.

More details and commentary later.

Link

Hats off to the Texas Longhorns, 2009 Fiesta Bowl winners.

A few brief bullets about the game:

• Why was Ryan Hamby wearing Anderson Russell’s uniform? (Okay. Just kidding. Had to get it out of the way.)
• For the first time in three years, we saw a “classic” Tressel performance. This is the type of scheme, effort, theme, and pace that we got used to seeing for the bulk of his tenure here at OSU. When he hit the jackpot with the 2006 squad, he took a step away, and got used to letting his players’ talent win games. Perhaps that caused the coaching staff to get a bit spoiled and lazy. Last night was the first time in a while that the coaches were collectively impressive. Which begs the question, why couldn’t we have seen something similar earlier in the season?
• Speaking about coaching, I’m shocked in scanning the boards that some are questioning the playcalling – are you kidding me? The best coaching performance of the season, perhaps the past two or three seasons. We saw creativity, misdirection, smashmouth physicality, and finesse. The offensive and defensive schemes were perfect; they worked perfectly to place OSU in position to win. All it came down to was execution – the game was literally in the hands of the players. With this roster, I cannot imagine anything Tressel or his staff could have done better. Fantastic job.
• For those trolls mocking the Buckeyes/Big 10 for being overrated: You can’t have it both ways. Last night’s game was not open to interpretation – Ohio State dominated Texas for all but the last 1m 49s. So either (1) the Buckeyes are a very good team, better than most give them credit for; or (2) Texas, which needed the Bucks’ defense to miss two INTs and one open field tackle on the last drive to win in miracle fashion, is not.
• This was the 1997 Rose Bowl in reverse. So this is how ASU fans felt when Germaine hit Boston for the TD with a few seconds left, eh?
• All of OSU’s stars had a great game, and collectively, it might have been the best performance of their career here at OSU: Beanie’s first-half depantsing of the nation’s #2 rush defense, which probably earned The Stiff Arm Of Justice^TM another few million dollars in signing bonus. Jenkins, who, if memory serves, did not allow the receivers he was covering a single catch last night – even though they collectively gained 414 yards. Robiskie’s 116 yards receiving, all of it seemingly coming on clutch catches. Pryor’s first down scrambles. Laurinaitis’ bazillion tackles. And last but not least…
• …Todd Boeckman. What a way for him to end his Buckeye career. No doubt he’s disappointed in the loss, but how awesome it was that he was still there when the team needed him, and he came through. If you haven’t noticed, this type of quiet, classy leadership and maturity has become a running theme for Tressel’s QBs by the end of their careers. And would you want it any other way?

Congrats to a great senior class. Your legacy will end on a positive note: as a competitive, selfless group of players that won 43 games (84%), four Big Ten titles in a row, competed for two national titles, outplayed what many consider to be one of the best teams in the country, stocked the NFL with tons of talent, and most importantly, beat Michigan four straight times. We’re proud of you. Best wishes.

ESPN featured a shockingly fair and balanced commentary of the Fiesta Bowl after the game last night.

That’s quite probably the first positive few minutes ESPN has spent on the Buckeyes in years. Even with the loss, the Buckeyes clearly won back quite a bit of respect.

…the Big Ten bashing, that is.

ESPN (who else?) leads off the bowl season with another anti-Big Ten article, this time by Michael Weinreb, who says the Big Ten is “a legacy of linebackers missing front teeth and running backs built like, well, Plymouth Valiants.”

And, once again, we’ve got another formulaic attack on the Big Ten. Weinreb clearly only has a rudimentary knowledge of college football, but is a clever-enough writer to mask his tenuous point behind a way-too-thick metaphor and a ton of superficial analysis. Presto! His entire point may be wrong, but who cares? He’s witty.

Worse yet, he’s stated his company line: The Big Ten had better do fantastic this bowl season, or it will confirm to the world that the conference is irrelevant.

That’s ridiculous. OF COURSE the Big Ten is going to fail miserably this bowl season. But it has nothing to do with the conference’s weakness — it’s a simple, reasonable outcome of the fact that all of the conference’s bowl representatives have unfavorable matchups. This occurred because Ohio State was selected for a BCS at-large slot. Once OSU was pulled away from the Big Ten affiliated bowls, the four other bowl-eligible teams “slid up” one slot to fill the vacancy.

Consider the following 2008/09 bowl matchups:

• Penn State vs. USC (#8 vs. #5)
• OSU vs. Texas (#10 vs. #3)
• Michigan State vs. Georgia (#18 vs. #15)
• Northwestern vs. Missouri (#23 vs. #21)
• Iowa vs. South Carolina (B10 5th vs. SEC 5th)
• Wisconsin vs. Florida State (B10 7th vs. ACC 4th)
• Minnesota vs. Kansas (B10 6th vs. Big 12N 3rd)

Of the above Big Ten teams, all are playing against higher ranked (or rated) opponents, with the exception of Iowa/SC, the lone relatively even matchup. In other words: seven teams, six underdogs and one even matchup. No favorites.

However… if Ohio State had not been selected to the Fiesta, the bowls would have likely looked this way:

• Penn State vs. USC (#8 vs. #5)
• OSU vs. Georgia (#10 vs. #15)
• Michigan State vs. Missouri (#18 vs. #21)
• Northwestern vs. South Carolina (#23 vs. SEC 5th)
• Iowa vs. Florida State (B10 5th vs. ACC 4th)
• Wisconsin vs. Kansas (B10 7th vs. Big 12N3rd)
• (Sorry, Minnesota.)

Now THAT is a more reasonable set of matchups. From this we can see that had OSU not been selected to the BCS, the Big 10 (from OSU on down) would have been on more “level ground” with respect to its opponents. There would have been a mix of favorited teams (Iowa/Fla St, OSU/GA), even-stevens (MSU/Mizzou, Wisco/Kansas), and underdogs (PSU/USC), instead of the current slate of games, in which the teams are all underdogs.

Big Ten fans are jealous, because this is the type of schedule that SEC, Pac 10, and Big 12 fans enjoy year after year. Meanwhile, Big 10 teams are just good enough and attractive enough to merit selections they probably don’t deserve.

For instance, because OSU got pulled into the BCS again – where it probably doesn’t belong this year – to play #3 Texas, Northwestern has to play Big 12 North champ Missouri.

The fact that the Big 10 is such a popular conference, and has so many good teams year to year, is probably why the conference gets such unfavorable matchups during each bowl season. Bowls are about money, not matchups, and therefore lesser-qualified Big 10 teams are consistently pulled into bowls against better opponents simply because they’re a higher $$ draw.

No other major conference has this issue. Mid-major teams like Utah and Boise St. are always underdogs, and deservedly so. But no other BCS conference has this perennial underdog matchup problem like the Big 10 does.

Put simply, the conference is too popular for its own good. It’s too good for its own good. Had OSU not finished in the top ten yet again, none of this would have happened.

So what’s left? Superficial articles like Weinreb’s that ignore matchups and instead base conference strength on bowl win-loss records.

Honestly, if the Big 10 even goes .500, that should be an indicator of the conference’s strength, not weakness.

So where did this false idea of Big 10 weakness come from, anyway?

Contrary to common opinion, the Big 10’s perceived weakness can be traced back to three events. Not a collection of data points, across years or decades, mind you – but three singular events that started this current fad of conference bashing. The talking heads took it from there.

1. OSU – Florida, BCS Championship, January 2007. One of the best Ohio State offenses in history shows up uninspired, poorly motivated, and gets spanked on national TV by a Florida team that felt disrespected by the media. Media overcompensates for their error by slobbering all over Urban Meyer.
2. OSU – Florida, NCAA Basketball Final, March 2007. Just 11 weeks after the BCS championship game, the Buckeyes play the Gators again, but this time on a basketball court. The Oden-led freshmen make a great effort, but are unable to topple the senior-filled Florida dynasty. At this point, it became fashionable for fans to chant “SEC! SEC!” while eating corn dogs and wearing jorts. Media REALLY likes the easy story angle the two championship games gave them, and moves from slobbering over Urban Meyer to slobbering over all things SEC.
3. Michigan – Appalachian State, Sept. 2007. Michigan craps its pants on national TV to Joe Bob’s University and Lube and Tire Clinic. Awesome for the schadenfreude, not awesome in that it literally caused the Mark Mays of the world to pee in their pants a little. Media moves from slobbering over SEC to full-blown writing it love letters, sending out radio dedications, and mild stalking.

Those three events in 2007 are the lens through which every Big 10 team’s failure of the past two seasons has been viewed. Yes, I know that the OSU losses to LSU and USC were bad for the Big 10, but in all reality, had either of those games happened “in the void,” that is to say, without the three events mentioned above, nobody would have read anything else into it other than the fact that LSU was a much better team last year than Ohio State was, or that it wasn’t surprising when a banged up OSU team without a running back didn’t beat a USC juggernaut.

It was only the events of the previous year that turned OSU’s losses into an example of the Big 10’s weakness by those who were looking for a superficial thing to analyze, rather than anything significant or substantial.

So, heading into another tough bowl season, nobody is likely to care that each Big 10 team is playing a higher-ranked or rated team, and that even being competitive on a consistent basis in that situation is admirable. Like I wrote above, if the Big 10 even wins half of these games, that would be a major feather in the conference’s cap.

And it’s an absolute shame that nobody else will see it that way.