Skull Session: Buckeyes Hold Nation's Longest Regular-Season Win Streak, The College Football Playoff Should Be Pushed Back, and Ohio State's Defense Wasn't That Bad

By Kevin Harrish on November 10, 2020 at 4:59 am
It's the ohio state logo in today's skull session.
97 Comments

Let this be the soundtrack to your morning:

Word of the Day: Promulgation.

 THANK YOU, CLEMSON. As if I needed any more reasons to celebrate a Clemson loss...

And with Boise State losing to BYU, Ohio State now sits alone with the highest winning percentage in all of college football.

Big weekend for convenient losses.

 YOUR MOVE, CFP. We're only two weeks away from the first College Football Playoff rankings of the season and there are still multiple Power Five teams that haven't played a single game yet and a substantial number that just started playing last week.

On top of that, we've got quite a few games that are looking like they'll be canceled this week and a few of them are already out of potential make-up weeks.

It's a mess, but there's an extremely easy fix.

I have no idea why the College Football Playoff hasn't done this already, to be honest. Maybe they just really trust their committee's ability to evaluate a team's playoff worthiness based on three games.

 CONTEXT, PLEASE. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that I was extremely pleased to see my team concede 27 points to a football team that frankly should have disbanded years ago.

But as always, context is key. And I'm glad I have my pal Bill Landis of The Athletic to point out that things really weren't anywhere near as bad as they seemed.

Ohio State’s defense is not what it was last year. It was never going to be. At the risk of parsing information to make things appear better than they actually are, here’s one way to look at how Rutgers moved the ball on Saturday:

• The Scarlet Knights had four gadget plays — a reverse, a direct snap to a running back, a tackle-eligible throwback and a double-pass off a jet sweep — that netted 118 yards and a touchdown.

• They had a 21-play, 82-yard drive at the end of the game when backup players such as Ryan Watts, Craig Young, Jerron Cage, Tyreke Johnson, Ronnie Hickman and Bryson Shaw were on the field for Ohio State.

• Around all of that, when Rutgers’ offense basically played Ohio State’s defense straight up, the Knights had 173 yards on 56 plays (3.1 yards per play).

The defense has things to clean up. I’m not quite sure it’s the disaster some are making it out to be.

I don't know. To me, it seems like Rutgers just gave every other team a blueprint for how to beat the Buckeyes – reverses, doubles passes and flea flickers with a few onside kicks worked in.

 BEHOLD, YOUR KING. The rest of college football had a few week's head start, but it's safe to say Justin Fields has caught up.

Let's be real though, this is expected. I'd be flipping tables if the guy with 908 passing yards and 11 touchdowns and an 86.7 completion percentage wasn't college football's highest-graded quarterback.

And you can go ahead and tack a fat asterisk onto that completion percentage.

 FATALITY. Marshon Lattimore's been bullying Mike Evans on the field for years, and now it looks like he's moved to cyberbullying.

Maybe next year he'll improve to *3* targets and no completions. Baby steps.

 NOT STICKING TO SPORTS. A man invents a robot that inserts and removes your contact lenses for you... Here’s how I finally got myself to start exercising... Things you may not have known about Alex Trebek... A 100-year-old pigeon carrier message written by a Prussian soldier during World War I is found in France... A woman posed as an FBI agent to get free fast food... The eerie AI world of deepfake music...

97 Comments

Trey Townsend Passes On Ohio State, Commits to Arizona

Trey Townsend

Joel Klatt Says Marvin Harrison Jr. Was “Definitively” The Best Receiver in College Football Last Year, Ohio State “Probably Should Be the No. 1 Team in the Country” This Year

Joel Klatt
View 97 Comments