As a survivor of the Cooper years, two losses in two years are hard enough.  I confess…I have NEVER rewatched a loss to Michigan.  In my life.

THREE losses in those two years and I would be like Fred Sanford…”I’m comin home Elizabeth!”

So, I was thinking…(and yes, we have to go through Georgia before any of this happens)…if we did beat Michigan in an historic national championship…how WOULD it happen?

My thinking is this…pre-bye and post-bye.  Why such a statistical drop off?  Injuries?  Maybe a little, but we of all teams, say “next guy up”.  So it’s not for lack of elite athletes, or a poor conditioning program, or a hundred other things the pundits all think they know.

It wasn’t even the fact that Harbaugh unleashed a cleverly hidden weapon in McCarthy’s pass game.  I’m trusting the bastard Harbaugh didn’t direct McCarthy into poor throws through the year just to tickle our nickel.  Remember?  Michigan didn’t really need much of a passing game if they could just run it down your throat, right?  I mean, that would be some high-quality H2O quarterback whispering, huh?

But if he did do that…well, he broke his number one toy doing it.  Good thing he has a decent spare…and future star in Edwards…but still a spare this year.

“So how?  How?”  I howl at the midnight sky outside my secluded Arkansas cabin where I withdrew from society recently…how would we have to beat them in an historic beating for the ages on Monday, January 9? (And even after that horse was dead, you would find me beating it still, my pummeling fists covered in Wolverine blood and flesh)

It boils down to Day.  Or rather, two Days.  This year, we saw the tale of two Days.  The first one, Head-Pounding Day, emerged after the bye, determined to improve on what many critics saw as an issue with balance.  He listened to the detractors.  That’s right.  After being told by the collective sports world that his team wasn’t tough enough…Mocked for being “born on third base and thought he hit a triple”. [I will always hate Jim Harbaugh for that classless slap after his FIRST win in seven tries].  And it was said on his way out the door like a coward throwing tomatoes at everybody…even deceiving his own players about his secretive hopes of using their backs to slither back to the NFL clutching his one pair of scarlet pants in seven tries.  He bit his lip for eleven months.  He just let others pile on the Buckeyes.  Pressure cooker on steroids.

And now he is emboldened.

But how would that Buckeye victory happen if it did?  

Since the inception of the forward pass in 1906, the game has changed a number of times.  New offenses, sounder defenses.  Dynamic athletes out the wazzoo.  More electric.

What Day has a unique ability to do (if he is not busy pounding his head into a door to prove a point)…is to hit defenses at their vulnerabilities.  They all have them, ours included, as we saw a heartbreaking Saturday ago.  But Head-Pounding Day veered from what would make sense…using a world class collection of receivers and the best quarterback in college football that ZERO teams in the playoff have an answer for…and just kept pounding his head into that damn door.

The second Day, Clear-Thinking Day says, “Screw you and your expectations and demands.  I’m gonna do what we do well and throw the fricking ball down your fricking throat and run it when I damn well please!  Now get off my lawn before I enlarge your fricking gonads!”

Or at least I hope that’s what “loose and aggressive” means.

And a national championship…against hated arch-rivals…after a loss to them that still feels like a knife hanging somewhere in my ribs (I stayed away from here for three days and I’m a daily reader)…a win?  After getting kicked in the teeth and mocked like that?  The flag planting?  The Michigan player who jumped up late in the third quarter after a big lead opened and cried out, “That’s who we thought they were!”  To come back and karma-kick his ass and the asses of his fellow asses…would be delicious.  

The Buckeyes are still the best team in college football…and will have to prove it now against #1 Georgia, and then #2 (an appropriate metaphor number for ttun).

All Clear-Thinking Day has to do is to take the governor off the Ferrari! 

Go Bucks!