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.

With that said, let’s get positive. I’m a firm believer in the power of good karma and positive energy and the effect it can have on the performance of a team. Think happy, positive thoughts, Buckeye Fans!

While we’re sending that positive energy down to the southwest,let’s look at five reasons why Ohio State will be victorious Monday night:

Nothing to lose – This may be a misnomer. The national perception of the Big Ten in general and Ohio State in specific has a lot to lose. Both are currently at all-time lows. Perception-wise, Ohio State can’t suffer another loss on the national stage. But as a team, Ohio State should be loose and free. I say “should be” but this team has seemed tight before. If they come out with nothing to lose, they may just surprise some people.

Texas is the team with something to prove. This could end up being in Ohio States favor.

Ohio State’s Defense – We looked at Texas’ offensive firepower earlier, with impressive numbers. Top ten in most of the important categories. They will bring the heat with the passing game and Colt McCoy is a dual-threat QB. But Ohio State’s Defense is no slouch.

OSU is only allowing opponents 279.3 yards/game and holding teams to 164.3 yards/game through the air. Oh, and only giving up 13.1 points/game. Contrast that to Texas’ numbers and it’s obvious that’s something has to give.

This, along with the offensive worries mentioned earlier, comes down to play calling. If Ohio State sits back in a comfy zone and rushes four, McCoy will pick them apart. Pressure from the corners and up the middle is going to be paramount. I don’t think Texas will probe the run early, so Ohio State needs to be ready to stop the pass immediately. Jenkins is a given, but Chekwa, Washington, and Hines need to play lights out.

Taking advantage of opportunities is also paramount. There may only be one or two opportunities to take the ball away from the Longhorns. The defense needs to jump at any chance they’re given.

Help us, Ohio State Defense. You’re our only hope.

Malcolm Jenkins While they would never say it, I wonder if the returning seniors are disappointed in the way this season turned out. I doubt Malcolm Jenkins would ever mention such things, but this game is now his (and Little Animal’s) Swan Song. The match-up of Jenkins vs. Cosby will be watched very closely. If you take one of McCoy’s weapons away, he may press and make a mistake. I look for Jenkins to play a very impressive game, shutting down his corner and having a huge impact all around.

The Stiff Arm of Justice™ – The best running back in the Big 12 is Oklahoma State’s Kendall Hunter (5′ 8″, 190) . He’s the only running back in the Big 12 to average over 100 yards/game. Texas hasn’t really seen a power back like Beanie. Let’s hope we see these early and often.

Beanie’s health will be a big factor in this game, but if he’s even 90%, look for him to run as mean as ever, gashing Texas good.

History – Finally, there’s the past. History is on our side. Ohio State is undefeated against Big 12 teams in bowl games (beating down Texas A&M and Kansas State in BCS games). Ohio State has already beat Colt McCoy.

There are more reasons to be optimistic, these are just a few. What has you thinking good, happy thoughts?

The prodigal bloggers return, with a healthy dose of pessimism and doubt. All season long, something has been off. Last season, the second trip to the MNC game against LSU was supposed to be a year early. This year was supposed to be the year. But after an injury to Beanie’s Toe and a disastrous showing in Southern Cal, this season has taken on a feeling of almost desperation. Fans are grabbing onto positives and try to ignore the cold hard truth — this team has its problems. A team with much potential, but not a lot to show for it. They are untested. How will they do against one of the best teams in the country? The facts say: not so hot.

Allow us, for a few minutes, to be negative and speculate on some reasons why Ohio State will lose to the Texas Longhorns (don’t worry, we will only allow the pessimism to last for so long)

Offensive firepower – Let’s get this one out of the way. Texas has offense weapons like whoa. While they’re runnning game doesn’t scare me much (but should it? They did average 176.9 yards/game), the combination of Colt McCoy, Quan Cosby and Jordan Shipley is dangerous. We should have a healthy fear of this. They averaged 476.4 yards/game, 301.3 yards through the air/game and 43.9 points per game. All in the top ten in the nation. Ohio State does have one of the better defensive backfields, but Texas can (and will) score at will.

Passing is the name of their game, but Colt will tuck and run. They run an efficient offense with a huge O-line. This has been giving me day- and nightmares.

Texas’ MNC snub – This could go either way but I think will harden their resolve. There’s no debating that Texas felt they deserved a spot in Thursday’s Championship game. Chip on their shoulder, something to prove, all that.

After Utah’s huge upset of LOLbama, the Monkey and I are thinking that Mack Brown will point his team to that outcome and Texas won’t be coming out asleep. They are hungry and want to show the nation that they deserve to be in the conversation again. Look for aggressive passing and play-calling early on. They’ll be going for the jugular.

Colt McCoy Heisman snub – Speaking of snubs, an argument could be made that Colt McCoy will also have something to prove. He is the focal point of the offense and he can and will do damage.

He’ll also be looking to exact revenge after he got smacked around in 2006. Remember when he looked like a scared 12 year-old with Laurinaitis breathing down his neck? Now he looks like a 14 year-old with chin stubble.

Ohio State Vanilla Offense – As mentioned earlier, Texas has a potent offense. Ohio State really doesn’t. If this becomes a shoot-out and Tressel is not sampling flavors at the ice cream counter, this will be ugly. There is no way we can hang with Texas in a barnburner.

I haven’t mentioned Texas’ defense at any point yet, but they do have a very good defense. The line anchored by beastman Orakpo (candidate for coolest name ever) and linebacker extraordinaire Kindle will cause havoc on Ohio State’s lackluster offensive line. If Tressel and Bolman aren’t calling plays to counter their aggresiveness, no amount of Stiff Arms of Justice™ will make a difference.

I’ll be on the bridge, ready to jump, if we line up in a power formation with Maurice Wells in the I. Seriously, I will take my own life. Or at least scream at the TV and embarrass myself in front of my friends and family.

BCS Burnout – This one be more about the fans than the football team. As Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg famously said “I know this music.” Buckeye fans are getting tired of seeing our team smacked around in front of millions on national TV. Surely the seniors on the team are equally tired. But will the motivation be there? This team has lacked leaders all season long. Will tomorrow night be any different?

Let’s hope so.

So those are a few things that are making me nervous. What worries you?

…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.

As announced this evening, your Ohio State Buckeyes will be heading to Glendale for something like the 23rd time, taking on the Texas Longhorns in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl on January 5th.

(Just an aside: I still hate non-January 1st bowl games. It just doesn’t feel right)

This is a dangerous game. A pissed-off Texas team. A young OSU QB. A huge monkey on OSU’s back of not winning a big game.

The question for Texas is: which team shows up? A dejected, “we should be in the MNC game” Texas? A post-Heisman Colt McCoy, primed to suffer the Heisman Hangover? A peeved Texas looking to make a statement? And which Ohio State team shows up? How will Terrelle Pryor benefit from the time off? What about Beanie? A full rested, mostly-healthy Beanie should scare the pants of Mack Brown.

If any team should fear a QB like Terrelle Pryor, it would be the Texas Longhorns. After watching Vince Young for three years, they know what they’re in for.

We’ll look at this match-up a little more in the coming weeks, but we’d love to hear your initial reactions. I’m not sure how I feel about playing in a BCS game this year. Both the Monkey and I were hoping for a match-up with an SEC team, preferably the imminently beatable Georgia Bulldogs in the Capitol One Bowl. We won’t look the gift horse in the mouth, but this match-up with arguably the best team in the country certainly isn’t doing us any favors.

A couple huge MotSaG congratulations go out to James Laurinaitis and Terrelle Pryor, who were named the Big Ten’s defensive player of the year and Big Ten Freshman of the Year, respectively. The awards were announced Monday night.

This should be the beginning of a plethora of awards thrown in the direction of the Ohio State players this year, and just the beginning of what Pryor will eventually be crowned with (three Heisman trophies, if you were wondering).

We’ll miss Little Animal, and welcome him into the Pantheon of Ohio State Linebackers of Destruction.

I’m giving Monkey the day off (though I know he’ll be active in the comments) and I’ll handle the semi-live update today. I’ve noticed that in previous semi-live blogs, I haven’t given much context to what elicited whatever comments I make, so I’ll be making an effort to giving a little more background to each comment.

(Also, I’m awaiting for some people to show up for the party, so I’ve got the game paused. I’ll catch up live as soon as I can, so this is, quite literally, a semi-live game update)

First Quarter
On 1st-and-10 Pryor rolls out to the left and throws an interception, returned to the 12. Blech.

Laurinaitis just knocked the stuffing out of Sheridan on 3rd-and-15 and then KC Lopato missed a chippy. LOL

Okay, right now the OSU offense is stuck in neutral but the turnover off the punt needs to be the little jolt that kicks it in gear. Let’s go, Pryor.

One word to describe Ohio State’s effort thus-far: Uninspiring.

Until Beanie Wells, ONCE AGAIN takes this team on his shoulders and takes care of business. He even gave a Michigan defender a mini SAoJ after the play.

Second Quarter
Pryor seems to have settled down, as he just hit Hartline, in stride, for a beautiful touchdown on 1st-and-10. That was the kind of play that was just waiting to happen. The beatdown is on.

Third Quarter
There’s not much to say right now, but Michigan has run 5 straight running plays, and they’re moving the ball rather easily. We need some big stops and big hits on defense right now.

Now we need a sustained drive from the offense. Or rip off 40 yards with Beanie. Or or gash them for 50 with Daniel “Boom Goes the Dynamite” Herron. That was nice.

Good to see that a) Ray Small is back on the field (I know he’s been fielding punts all day) and b) he’s playing well. That eighty yard punt return was smooth.

Fourth Quarter
**MotSaG Standing Ovation** for Todd Boeckman!!