End of First Quarter

Good to see Smith, et. al drive right down the field on the first drive. However, words cannot describe the disgust I feel at the obvious bias of the officials. OSU was called for one phantom interference call (that allowed Iowa to score a FG), and two – count ’em, two – pass interference calls were ignored when Iowa’s DBs committed them. The first clearly showed the DB dragging the WR by the shirt from behind; the second, a clear tackle before the ball got to the WR.

Buckeye Commentary pointed out the statistical bias the Big 10 officials seem to have against OSU “Play OSU, enjoy few penalties.” I know I sound a bit like a “whiny fan”, but his statistics seem pretty persuasive, and the first quarter of this game offers more evidence. Let’s hope that the officials step up for this game.

End of Second Quarter
Tressel’s game plan is having some success. If you want to beat Iowa, you’ve got to pound, pound, pound in the first half. Wear the not-as-deep Iowa defense down for the second half (OSU is leading fourth quarter scoring by 52 to 9 because of this game plan!) Beanie and Pittman are carrying the game right now, which is perfect.

Nice to see the OSU offense get 7 after the INT; conversely, it was nice to see OSU’s defense make Iowa go three-and-out after they got field position in OSU territory after the shanked punt. The defense is definitely getting into Tate’s head.

OSU is “in control” of this game, so I’m not as nervous as I was in the first quarter. Still, don’t count Tate out. And who is this Iowa TE, Chandler? What is he, like 11 1/2 feet tall? Seems like it. What a great football player. Gonna be a good pro TE someday if he keeps it up.

End of Third Quarter
Classic Big10 third quarter. OSU is pounding the Iowa D-linemen. Gonzo’s catch and run for TD is (to me) the best highlight of the year so far. Tressel is clearly happy with 28 points, and Tresselball has ensued.

Iowa is continuing to spiral down, although they caught a break by the official’s overturning the TGII first down catch. Third and long, deep in Iowa territory. They’ll go for the TD, then try a FG try to start the fourth quarter. Here we go…

End of Game
Final: OSU 38 – Iowa 17

Not much to say. OSU has beaten the spread for the past dozen or so games. When will Corso get it?

Helmet stickers to the defense, who got in Tate’s head tonight. Two turnovers in the last quarter – and yes, the Little Animal got one of them.

Boy… if Tressel had gone for the FG in the last drive, my prediction of OSU’s 41 point offensive performance would have been right on. Sweatervest decided to play it classy, though, and run his third team O-line and RB until time ran out. So el Kaiser was right on predicting Iowa would get two TDs, and Zeke and I were right on regarding the proficience of the OSU offense.

I was pretty nervous about MSU, but looks like they decided to start choking a week or two early. Now, it looks like OSU has a downhill ride to UM… and holy cow, both teams might be undefeated by then.

No doubt you’ve heard of the recent scandal involving an online company’s accidental release of private search engine logs. Well, here at MotSaG, we’ve uncovered quite a scoop for you.

el Kaiser, SYR, Zeke,and I have spent most of our nights and weekends for the past month poring over the gigabytes of data to extract interesting patterns in the search logs. Lo and behold, we hit the jackpot with user ID #1039375. This person had the most, uh, “intriguing” log. Here’s a year’s worth of his search strings, tagged with date and ranking.

Sound like anyone you know?

What’s wrong with this graphic?

Yes, it’s the banner from the BCS main site. Look closer:

Ahh.. the BCS conference icons. Don’t see the problem yet? Let’s move in closer…

By now, 99% of you know what’s wrong here. For the remaining 1% (i.e., those visiting MotSaG from ESPN domains), I’ll highlight it for you:

Please understand that I’m not anti-Notre Dame. I’m just anti-favoritism. As a college football fan, it disturbs me when a team gets rewarded for mediocrity, simply because they have good marketing and legal departments.

Kudos to Big Blue, not only for taking the Irish to the woodshed, but also for embarrassing the sports pundits in the major media who have been slobbering over Weis & co. Apparently, OSU’s beatdown of the same team in the Fiesta Bowl wasn’t good enough.

What I worry about now is a situation where a one-loss ND team sneaks into the championship mix over a more deserving team. For example, if OSU and West Virginia go undefeated, will the BCS find a way to bump WVA out of the championship game so it can give the Irish a shot at the title?

Or what if WVA goes undefeated, but OSU, Auburn, USC, and the Irish end up with one loss? Of course that would mean that the Irish beat USC in a high-profile game at the end of the season. Would that be enough to jump them over Auburn and OSU, even though those teams are light-years ahead of Notre Dame?

Again, to reiterate: I’m not anti-ND. But consider, for a moment, all 100-plus teams represented by these icons…

ND plays the same game as all of them, but gets to use different rules, and doesn’t even attempt to justify it by being dominant or anything.

So what’s my solution? Let’s bring ND into the Big Te(leve)n. We’ll be happy to give them Illinois’ spot (we’ll just send the Illini down to I-AA). They play UM every year anyway, and can schedule USC in the preseason. Let’s see how good Weis really is with annual matchups against Carr, Carroll, Paterno, and Tressel.

You know – make ’em earn respect, like everyone else has to do.

Some thoughts and reactions from Week #3 (aka Win or Die Week). The Big Ten finally flexed its muscles a little more than last week. Sure, Penn State whacked around the 1-AA Youngstown Penguins and Illinois and Indiana lost (we don’t claim them, but no one else will take them) but the rest of the Big Ten looked stronger. Thanks go to Michigan for embarassing Notre Dame and Charlie Weis on their own TV station. That sure was fun to watch.

I didn’t get to see as much of the LSU vs. Auburn but both teams looked solid. It sure seemed like there was a lot more offense than the 7-3 score.

How is Larry Coker still coaching at Miami? He was another embarassment this week. How much longer before they rehire Butch Davis? The Card Report has some words of warning for teams that disrespect the Logo.

Michigan spanks Notre Dame, the M-Zone and MGoBlog explode. Now that Weis has lost to a top team again, can we stop calling him a genius? I think it’s time to put that to bed. Manningham and the Michigan defense looked pretty darn good. Who was soft again? Unfortunately for Quinn, he didn’t do much to bolster his Heisman chances. He looked lost out there at times.

I see that Texas decided that, after getting smacked around in the deep end by the big boys, they’d go over to the kiddie pool and beat up the second grader with the arm floaties. Good job.

A lot of good football today. The Blogpoll will definitely get a serious reshuffling this week. My top 5 looks like:

1. Ohio State (duh)
2. Auburn (had them here since preseason)
3. USC (still strong)
4. West Virginia (Slaton is fast)
5. Florida

MotSaG’ers Zeke and Sylvester-Yon Rambo were both over at Casa del Kaiser for the Texas game, so as we watched the press conference and College Gameday, we discussed some of our impressions after the big Texas win.

Zeke – Lauranaitis played well, but the entire defense came together in a big way. Jay Richardson almost murdered McCoy (which resulted in bad call, judgement or not). McCoy looked lost, there was no urgency by Texas in the fourth quarter.

SYR – Lauranaitis really impressed me, forced fumble, INT, a load of tackles. Tressel pretty much out-coached Mack Brown. I was surprised how little confidence Texas showed in Colt McCoy. Knowing our defensive backs were so unexperienced, I thought they’d go after them but it took Texas a long time to just throw the ball down the field. Gonzo was huge.

el Kaiser – Before the game, we each picked a player who we thought would be the difference maker. I went with Anthony Gonzalez, and he played huge. He benefitted greatly from the attention paid to Ted Ginn Jr. He made #28 look silly all night long. Another big difference was how well OSU was getting fresh legs in the whole game. Tressel said his goal was to get 57 (out of 70) players in the game in the first half, and I think that made a difference.

Another thought I had was how this Texas team looked like a classic Mack Brown-coached team – no intensity, no fight after they were down. It really looked like they gave up after Pittman scored the last touchdown.

We all decided that even though we really, really, really hate the new time-keeping rules, we had no problems with them tonight.

This feels good, we’ll all be sleeping well tonight in Columbus (if we can ever fall asleep).

sportsMonkey
(Tooting my horn again here…) but like I figured, Texas was going to need about 30 points out of McCoy to beat the Buckeyes. I was surprised he didn’t get close, though. What shocked me most was that we were just one bad ref’s call away from a shutout! How can you have Charles and Young pile up almost 170 yards, and only come away with one TD?

OSU’s “bend but don’t break” defense did what they were supposed to do. Everyone’s high on Smith today, but to me, Laurinitis deserves the game ball. He did more than any other player to break the spirits and take the fighting spirit away from the ‘Horns. He caused a pivotal fumble, got an INT, broke up several passes, made a couple tackles for loss, and (if my memory serves) made a sack. No doubt Hawk was proud.

Finally, as opposed as I am to violence of any sort, will someone please take Matthew McConaghey away and place him in the nearest trash compactor?