Happy Tuesday everybody, and welcome to your morning Skull Session. Like a lot of people, I expected USC to give Oregon a bit more of a fight than they ended up having last weekend, but as per usual the Ducks flew together and wore down the Trojan defense pretty thoroughly during the course of the game. And they needed to, because they also gave up 32 points and 27 first downs. What's astonishing to me is that at this late juncture of the season, the two highest ranked teams in the country are primarily offensive teams with suspect defenses; the media keeps talking about Oregon's 4th quarter defense being so good, but when the other team is forced to throw on every single play as a result of being down by 5 touchdowns, I think that might be more a product of the situation and not the actual talent.
The truth is that Oregon has played three teams with a pulse (Stanford, USC, and Arizona State), and given up 30+ points to each of them. Auburn hasn't been much better, allowing 24ish points a game this year. In terms of yardage allowed, Oregon is 36th in the country with 336.8 ypg allowed, and Auburn is 57th at 358.3 ypg allowed. It'll be very interesting to see what happens at the end of the season with these teams, because their offenses almost have to keep up their level of production if the Ducks and the Tigers want to stay undefeated.
Depth Chaaaahaha GOT YA Yeah, no depth chart this week. The Bye week will be good for several players as they attempt to rest and heal up before the home stretch; specifically Ross Homan and Dorian Bell. Both of these guys should be ready to go for Penn State, Bell was concussed so it depends on how severe it was, but Homan began doing some dry land running recently and should be fine. Also, despite playing, Stoneburner and Pryor will both probably be pretty happy about having another week to rest their respective nagging tweaks.
The Big Ten Race, Explained There's been a lot of debate as to how exactly this crazy thing we call the Big Ten is going to shake out, but luckily Matt Hinton over at Dr. Saturday has set it all out for us like Thanksgiving dinner. As far as Ohio State is concerned: win out, watch Wisconsin lose to somebody, go to the Rose Bowl. The problem: Wisconsin's final 4 games are against Purdue, Indiana, Michigan, and Northwestern. Hmm.
Not A Great Year To Be A Nittany Lion Things are rough all around for Penn State. Not only is their team bad, but now their primitive bronze-age culture has descended into chaos, with brothers attacking brothers and mascots being forever banished from the land. An ancient Mayan prophecy once foretold of the End Times should JoePa ever get his 400th win, and it looks like PSU is right on the precipice of the Apocalypse.
They've Lost The Deck Chairs Anyway Speaking of going from bad to worse, Michigan now has dropped three in a row and is going into a brutal four game stretch where they have to play Illinois, Purdue, Wisconsin, and, obviously, Ohio State. The Wolverine defense has not improved one iota over the course of the season, but Rich Rod isn't prepared to make any coaching changes to try and somehow turn it around for those last games.
"I'm not going to be able to wave a magic wand myself and fix some of the issues," Rodriguez said. "Some of the problems are not going to get fixed overnight."
Or, you know, ever.
Miller Versus Middies Braxton Miller will lead Wayne against my hometown Middletown Middies this Saturday night, in what should be a very good Division I playoff game. The Middies are undefeated for the first time since the Great Depression (the Middletown Journal actually had an article asking which team is better; I'll take the one that uses a weight room and the forward pass, thanks), but Wayne is turned on the jets in the second half of the year and Braxton is currently playing at a very high level. I didn't attend MHS so I don't have a real dog in this fight, but it's a lot more fun to read articles about the Middies than the Miami Redhawks (seriously, who cares?).
Back To JoePa 400 wins is a lot of wins. It requires someone to be a football coach for an almost impossibly long time, and really there are only a few people alive who can even begin to understand what it means. One of those guys, Bobby Bowden, recently shared his views on the subject with the Altoona Mirror in a phone interview that I find to be particularly funny. Granted, I'm not a fan of the guy, which helps in the humor department, but you can practically hear his teeth grinding as he says:
"I know Joe had a rough time [a few] years ago, went through what I did, and his folks let him come back," Bowden said. "That's what I was trying to do. But he deserves everything he can get."
Yes, Joe does deserve 400 wins. You, who had to vacate several wins due to scandal and had a long history of overlooking player misconduct, didn't.
