Angry Buckeye Defensive Player Hating God gets a bye week, too. The Buckeyes are spending the bye week the only way they can this season: licking wounds, taping up ankles and hoping for some good luck. With a week to get healthy before Penn State comes to town, the Buckeyes are actually in a pretty good spot to close out the season with a relatively healthy squad:
[The Penn State game] should mark the return of two injured linebackers, Tressel said. Starter Ross Homan has been out since suffering a foot injury on Oct. 16 but has resumed running and hopes to be back next week.Reserve Dorian Bell, who has suffered two concussions this season, is farther along than Homan, Tressel said, and also should return next week."I'm not a big open-week fan," Tressel said. "But that doesn't mean there aren't some pluses."
Chances are that if Homan or Bell don't seem up to speed by the time Penn State rolls around, they'll sit out the game (or stay on the bench, in Bell's case) and play the next week in Iowa City, where they'll probably be needed far more than against the Nittany Lions' woeful offensive attack. In other practice notes, Jake Stoneburner has looked better in practice this week after essentially disappearing from the game plan following his return from a high ankle sprain. Oh, and this is cool too:
Tressel said he was excited about the opportunity that Troy Smith is getting to be the starting quarterback in San Francisco. He said 49ers coach Mike Singletary called him last week as he was making the decision to start Smith, who had been the third-stringer, while starter Alex Smith was hurt. Tressel said those kinds of calls from NFL coaches aren't the norm during the season.
"As a parent, I was like, 'Ooo, what did Troy do?" Tressel said. "Because that's the way you look at things as a parent. So I called him back real quick and it was good news. ... I think he was in the midst of a real decision-making thing and he wanted to be sure."
This is why JT rocks.
Get knowledge'd. If you aren't reading Ross Fulton's breakdowns of Ohio State's strategies on both sides of the ball over on Along The Olentangy, you don't know what you're missing. When a dude puts a headline like Ohio State Breaking Tendencies and Embrace of the 'Constraint Theory' of Offense in an article, you now he's putting in some effort. This week, Ross reviews the Minnesota offensive gameplan, and comes away impressed with Ohio State's ability to break tendencies, a favorite offensive theme of JT's:
OSU not only had balance on the general level between their run and pass game. Instead, it became obvious that OSU was seeking to break tendencies within the run game. Most specifically, OSU sought to a) run weakside from the tight end, and b) run away from Zach Boren. OSU not only re-set their tendencies by doing so, but clearly confused Minnesota's linebackers throughout the game.
No one's going to mistake either JT or Jim Bollman for Rich Rodriguez Urban Meyer Chip Kelly any time soon, but against teams like Minnesota, they don't have to be geniuses. For the team's sake, let's hope the "harmonic convergence" of game plan and execution is enough to beat the Hawkeyes (and their beastly DL) in two weeks.
Harbaugh is mildly displeased. Michigan is on probation, but Rich Rodriguez is off the hook, at least in terms of NCAA action. In the end, it seems the accusations against Rodriguez were largely trumped up by the Detroit Free Press. Allow Dr. Saturday to explain:
The tepid infractions that came to light as a result of the Freep's digging are the minimum you'd expect to find at any sprawling program operating under a massive handbook, as the basic cost of employing fallible human beings while continuing to dead-lift with the Joneses. Other programs, however, weren't the target of an investigation by a major metropolitan newspaper that left no stone unturned in its efforts to make a splash against a high-profile coach who almost immediately cleaved the fan base down the middle. Michigan was, which is why it was Michigan that was forced to roll its eyes and slap itself on the wrist in halfhearted contrition as the "probation" label is applied for the first time in school history.
So yeah, in the end, not a big deal, likely not a fireable offense, and Rich Rodriguez is still one win away from bowl eligibility and he has to hope that's enough to save his job. On a side note, can you imagine the uproar in our fanbase if the Dispatch pulled a stunt like this? Incredible.
It's been a long time comin'. Everyone here remembers the lean days of, say, '06-'09, when in the national media, the Big Ten just couldn't catch a break. Sure, we deserved some of the lumps we took, but not all of them. But now that the Big Ten, following a stellar bowl season to close out '09, has become arguably the most competitive league in country (with Oregon dominating the Pac-10, the SEC East being a wasteland, and the ACC and Big East being more or less non-entities), it's starting to get a little more love from the pundits, obscure though they may be:
Take the Big Ten, for example. Ohio State has won at least a share of the Big Ten conference title in each of the past five years, while over the past nine seasons, only four of the conference’s 11 teams have won or shared a conference crown. With Saturday’s Michigan State loss in Iowa City, four Big Ten teams currently have one loss in conference play heading into the final month of the season. The last time the Big Ten’s been this tight heading into its final month of play was 2000, when Michigan, Purdue, and Northwestern finished in a three-way tie for first place with identical 6-2 records.
[...]
For fans of the conference (and its broadcast partners), that’s far more of an accomplishment than seeing an undefeated or one-loss Ohio State team take on an SEC powerhouse with a national title on the line. The aforementioned four one-loss teams are all in the top 20 of this week’s BCS standings, while Illinois, Penn State, Northwestern, Purdue, and Michigan are either already bowl eligible, or just one or two wins away. In its last year before transitioning to divisional play, the Big Ten is as competitive from top to bottom as it has been since that memorable 2000 campaign.
Holy crap, someone mentioned the thought of us in a bowl game against an SEC team and didn't crack a joke about "speed"? The times, they are a-changin'. We'll never get the love we should from someone like Mark May, but it's still nice to see the Buckeyes being mentioned as something other than the butt of a lazy joke by national writers these days.
