Thursday Skull Session

Good morning and welcome to another day of dealing with the fact your conference is led by a good-ole boy network of dinosaurs hell bent on keeping it from reaching its ultimate potential - all while spitting in your face. 

The unfortunately predictable news that Delaney and the AD's decided to wave the white flag on the subject of on campus semifinal playoff games to protect a tradition that had essenetially already died years ago is just the latest reason to be embarrassed about the conference as a whole. 

To hide behind the fallacy that elite B1G teams set the Rose Bowl as their ultimate goal is a joke. That joke becomes the kind you don't deliver in front of women and children when you basically go out of your way to disadvantage your own teams by not pushing for warm climate schools to possibly play big boy football in football weather. 

As icing on the cake, the decision makers put an even greater financial burden on fans who will be racking up a lot more air miles with no chance of a home semifinal or at least a semifinal potentially located within the conference footprint. 

With self inflicted decisions like this, it's not hard to understand why the B1G struggles to be elite on the gridiron. But hey, at least we still have the Rose Bowl tradition.

Yay. 

BACK TO THE HOTEL - N2DEEP. Urbz released the post spring two deep yesterday and met with the media to discuss a wide range of topics. Chad will have more on the two deep and just how concrete it might be at certain positions while UFM also offered some insight. 

Despite an acute case of Urban-Fever, for me, and I'm sure many of you, there's still plenty of concerns on the offensive side of the ball. Particularly, the lack of overall o-line depth and glaring worries on the right side make me nervous for Braxton's health. Marcus Hall was highly touted but so far he's been an underachiever at best and at right tackle, the starter is a guy who's never played the position backed up by a true freshman. I won't say I'm panicked but I'm at least a little bit scurred as I have to imagine it'll be tough for the skill guys to succesfully implement and execute a new offense if one side of the line is consistently collapsing. 

Urban remains down on the receivers calling them the most unprepared group he's ever played with though I personally have more faith in two guys from the Smith, Philly, Spencer and Cant Guard Mike than I do Hall and Fragel/Decker holding down the right flank of the trenches. 

The good news is the other side of the ball looks to be in much better shape with a defensive line stacked and a Shazier-led LB corps that should be much faster with Klein and Sweat no longer in the fold. I'm also intrigued by Doran Grant being listed as a co-starting CB opposite Bradley Roby. There's no question Travis Howard failed to live up the hype last year and with 2012 being a throwaway season of sorts, the more youngsters that play, the better. 

I GOTTA SPLIT MAN - I'VE GOT PRIORS. As we've seen in the early going since Ohio State was slapped with three years probation, scholarship reductions and a 2012 post-season ban, such sanctions don't necessarily decimate a program if it has the right leadership and pedigree. 

A program a little further along in the healing process, the USC Trojans, is straight killing it on the recruiting trail and the Heisman Pundit takes a look at how NCAA sanctions might have actually helped Lane Kiffin's program. 

I'm not willing to go that far but the Trojans do provide a blueprint from which Ohio State can take pieces and implement into their own recovery. 

With scholarship reductions, one strategy is to take fewer chances on questionable kids because swings and misses come with greater impact. This means passing on a kid that could ultimately not have the academic or common sense chops to stay off the police blotter and by extension not be able to play. It also means really doing homework on kids to fully understand the potential risks involved.

Another obvious benefit that we should see this fall is an increased learning curve as kids get more opportunities to play. With Ohio State's lack of depth and/or proven commodities at positions like o-line and receiver, those groupings could feature a lot of rotations meaning kids will get opportunites to develop via actual game experience. That could prove invaluable as we've seen how practice exploits (T-Wash?) don't necessarily translate to gameday success. 

Again, I'm not willing to say penalties actually help Ohio State but I do think if attacked properly, the current disadvantages could help make Ohio State considerably more dangerous in 2013 and beyond than they might have been otherwise. 

Charlie checks out of South Bend

OH, A WEIS-GUY, EH? (/CURLY VOICE). It's fun to poke the Wolverines for the disastrous Rich Rod hire but it looks like a stroke of genius compared to Notre Dame's hiring of Charlie Weis. 

The man that was to give the Domers a huge schematic advantage used his superior offensive coaching techniques to generate a 35-27 record before being run out of town on a flat bed truck. 

As Erick Smith notes, it's been two years and three jobs since the Irish shot callers pushed Weis out (via the loading dock and an assist from a hydraulic lift) but they're still feeling the gift of Charlie. Terminating Weis after having given him a 10 year contract, Notre Dame has already paid him about $8.7 million. 

Staggeringly, through 2015, they will have paid upwards of $19 mil for a coach that won 56% of his games, or basically $1.8 mil per victory. Man, that was fun to type.  

CONCUSSIONS CLAIM ANOTHER CAREER. We covered this briefly in Buckshots yesterday but damn is it scary what we don't know about concussions. 

Andrew Sweat became the latest to suffer the consequences of too many blows to the head, ending his career before making it to Cleveland's training camp earlier this week. He claims to have dealt with three concussions at Ohio State, the effects lasting much longer than the window with which he was held out of competition as told to the venerable Doug Lesmerises:

"I've never been depressed in my life. I'm the most positive person, and I was down. I knew it wasn't me. I couldn't control my thinking. I was not myself. My mind was not there. Some of the thoughts that were out there, I was getting worried about that."

Sweat says the effects lasted through the first quarter of 2012 and resurfaced after bumping his head during a fall in the shower earlier this month. 

Smartly, he weighed the pros/cons of pursuing his dream of playing in the NFL and called it quits. We wish him health and success in his future off field endeavors. 

MIXTAPE. Chris Brown wrote a book that demands your disposable income... Not a documentary you want to star in... BONE to reunite and perform "E. 1999 Eternal" in its entirety!... Just a school of stingrays... Anchorman 2 has a poster... Sabotage with kids.