Twitter Reactions: Turn Up The Dark To Eleven

By Johnny Ginter on October 18, 2015 at 8:30 am
GOOD VERSUS EVIL ROUND ONE FIGHT
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When famous Ohioan, Civil War general, and really terrible president Ulysses S. Grant was born, he was actually named Hiram Ulysses Grant. But upon entering West Point, the admissions office used the name that the congressman had accidentally written on his letter of recommendation, and U.S. Grant was born. His friends at West Point called him Sam, after Uncle Sam, but he'd get an even cooler moniker during the Civil War when he demanded (and won) the unconditional surrender of Fort Donelson and became "Unconditional Surrender" Grant.

I bring all of this up because J.T. Barrett has a ready made nickname that came about as a result of being near-automatic in the red zone in the past few games. You can make a lot of arguments in favor of his relief quarterbacking duties expanded from the red-ish zone to the entire field, but focusing on the data at hand, it's pretty insane what he's been able to accomplish in a decidedly weird role.

Then again, maybe it isn't. After all, Barrett is the guy who set the record books on fire and danced naked in their ashes last season. That he'd have massive success getting his team into the end one is not especially surprising in context. Ohio State has scored on 12 out of 12 of its last red zone trips, and given that 11 were touchdowns, it's hard not to think that the success percentage is that high specifically because of J.T. Barrett.

J.T. "Just Touchdowns" Barrett, I mean, because that's what we're calling the dude until further notice.

Oh yeah, and there was a blackout! Maybe you'd heard about it; something about finding every way possible to mock the immutable laws of Ohio State RITUAL and CLASS or whatever.

And it turned out great, sorry old people. Maybe one out of every ten fans were still slaves to the artificial allure of staid, unchanging capital-T TRADITION and did not wear black, but most (way more than I expected, actually) were cool and good and went ahead and wore black and got at least 55% rowdy. Ohio Stadium could've been much rowdier overall, but I was pleased with the effect.

Ideally this can become an annual thing, because hell, we've been doing alternates for nearly a decade anyway, might as well attach them to a night game where you want to pull out all the stops and get a little big crazy.

To be fair, for much of the game the brunt of the burden was borne by the defense. Joey Bosa in particular was spectacular, and Darron Lee had some thoughts on both that and a questionable targeting call that got one of his defensive mates thrown out of the game.

Also, Carp had the following #hot #take on Barrett:

Here's the thing; on paper, I agree with Bobby. J.T. is statistically nearly perfect right now, is a level headed kid with amazing leadership skills, and has proven that he can carve up the Big Ten with ease. But not on paper, I know that Urban made Cardale the starter and if going to give him as many reps as ol' Dolo thinks he needs. This is going to be a very difficult few weeks as the team and the media tries to hash things out, but I can probably guess that Cardale will come out on top unless he suffers a horrific bee-related injury or something along those lines.

Cardale, for his part, knows how to focus on the positive and not the 108,000 people chanting the name of his back up during the game.

And again, Darron Lee knows how to understand what truly matters in life, even though others may not agree with the path that he has chosen for himself.

For my part, I'm down with Darron. Let's do it up again, and soon, because last night was pretty amazing.

The Silver Bullets were firing:

The wideouts seemed to be in good spirits:

And this is a thing that happened:

So overall, a pretty damn good time. Now someone please explain to me what the hell Pittman meant by this, thanks in advance:

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