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USA Today has released their preseason coaches poll for the 2007 NCAA football season. The Big Ten has three teams in the top ten (Michigan, 5th (2 first place votes); Wisconsin, 7th; Ohio State, 10th), four in the top 25 (Penn State, 18th), and five that received votes (Iowa, 18 votes). The three top ten teams is tops for any conference in the country. Go Big Ten!
I never thought that I would see the day that I would be pulling for U of M to make it into the national championship game. Alas, that day has come. Now that USC has lost to UCLA and Florida has beaten Arkansas for the SEC championship, it looks like Florida might be the frontrunner for the opportunity to play OSU for the national championship. Heck, even the color guy who was doing the SEC championship game for CBS kept saying how much better Florida was than Michigan, even getting to the point of pulling out their schedules and comparing them side-by-side, a comparison that he said Florida won hands-down. (Chris is gonna love how he said how much better LSU was compared to Wisconsin. Don’t feel bad, I think Wisconsin could beat LSU too.)
It’s almost like no one is actually watching Florida play any of their games, even the TV announcers. They make claims about how good Florida is, but they look confused half of the time that they are on the field and it seems like they challenge themselves each week to see how quickly they can burn through their timeouts. For instance, today they burned through all of their second half timeouts before the six minute mark of the third quarter! Not only that, but Urban Meyer and his quarterback, Chris Leek, both seem to be unable to grasp the concept of clock management. Sure, they end up winning the game, but they sure as heck don’t deserve it. Also, I have never seen a team get so many bad penalties. Tonight, in a neutral stadium, they picked up at least five false start penalties and other stupid penalties.
Another point that the TV guys keep talking about is how Florida needs "style points" in order to get past Michigan. While I agree with this, they always go on to bring up the 2002 Ohio State team that won the national championship over The U (Miami University) while having a team that never won pretty the entire season. What they seem to forget was that we won all of our games that season. Florida lost to Auburn, and not by a little either. Please, stop comparing our team of destiny to this team of wannabes.
Michigan, on the other hand, only has a loss to OSU, the number one team in the nation. They also hold the credit of handing the only loss to Wisconsin, another top-ten team. In their loss to OSU, they looked much more impressive than Florida has looked all season, and this came against one of the best defenses in the nation. They have been impressive all season and are more than deserving to hold the number two spot, behind OSU.
I haven’t been looking forward to a rematch with Michigan, but at this point it would indeed be the best game that you could get. OSU would lay a Texas-sized smack down on Florida if they ended up as their opponent. USC would have been the ideal match up, but they went and screwed things up by losing to UCLA. At this rate, we will end up with a playoff, if only to just shut up Urban Meyer when he finds out how lacking his Gators really are compared to the top teams in the Big Ten.
You know what? I have a proposal. If Florida wants a go at OSU for the national championship, then they should have to go through Michigan first. When they get their butts handed to them by Michigan’s freshman class, then Michigan can bring out their first stringers for the real national championship game with OSU. Then the SEC and the rest of the country would be happy… Well, at least the rest of the country. The SEC would be too busy trying to reconnect with reality. (Yep, that’s right. SEC football is no better than any other conference. Just because you’re from down South where you can train outside year-round doesn’t automagically make you superior to everyone else in football. We grow athletes up in the Midwest too.)
Mack Brown, the coach of the University of Texas football team, placed the bulk of the blame for his team’s 24-7 loss to Ohio State on the new clock rules instituted for this season. According to him, the new rules robbed his team of 22 minutes that could have been used to mount a comeback. I think that he needs to watch the game again. At most, the new rules took about two minutes of game time away from both teams, combined. Two minutes is hardly enough time to rattle off 17 points against a defense that had stopped all but one of the team’s scoring attempts. If 22 minutes of the game were lost due to the new rules, it would be like loosing over a quarter of the game, which certainly didn’t happen. I think that Mack just needs to cope with the fact that his team is not the best in the nation (and that he will never win a national championship without Vince Young) and get on with his life. At least he has a pretty ring to look at for the rest of his life. (He’s lucky that Troy Smith didn’t start last year’s game, otherwise he wouldn’t have any championship rings, but that’s another story.)
In case you haven’t noticed, I have hardly touched my blog over the past couple of months. I’ll choose to blame this on school. When you are taking 20 credit hours AND have a TV in your room, time for blogging just seems to disappear.
Now, next subject: the Buckeyes. Since most of my readers happen to hail from Buckeye country, I am sure that you have been hearing plenty about the Bucks. At this point in the season, with two losses, we are extreme long shots for the national championship game, the Rose Bowl. Our only losses this season have come to unbeaten teams: #2 Texas and #9 Penn State. I hope that it stays this way: no more losses for us or Texas or Penn State. I would rather loose a close one to a unbeaten team than one that has lost a few. Even how, we need Penn State to lose two, Wisconsin to lose once more, and to win out, to have a chance at winning the Big Ten.
Now, who or what could we attribute the two losses to? I think that the first one could be placed squarely on the quarterback carousel that we ran during that game. Our loss to Penn State, and our poor offense, I think can be attributed partially to the unproductive season that Ted Ginn is having. Six games into the season, he only has two touchdowns and has been ineffective almost every time that he has touched the ball. If Ginn can get on track, I think that our offense could really start rolling. Considering that our running attack is doing better this year with Antonio Pittman at tailback, we could be even more effective than last year. Right now, I can only hope.
Expect to hear more from me in the near future. Even if I haven’t been writing much in the past few months, I have been collecting things to write about, so I am not short on material.
I’m sure that most of you probably remember all of the OSU bashing that ESPN has been airing since we won the national championship in 2002. Always saying how we didn’t deserve it and how Miami actually beat us and we just got lucky because of an official’s call. Then they started talking about Maurice and how stupid he was and then all of the allegations against us for the alleged academic affairs of our players (none of which ended up turning into anything).
Well, it appears that it might be coming to an end. I was watching the College GameDay season preview special yesterday morning and, as usual, the hosts did a pole of Heisman hopefuls and conference favorites and who would go to the national championship game (the Rose Bowl this year). I was a little peeved when they barely mentioned Ted Ginn at all. About all they said is that if we lose to Texas, he’ll be out of the running. When it came to national title discussion, I expected USC and U of M to dominate discussion since a lot of the people were high on Chad Henne (QB) and Michael Hart (RB). As I expected, everyone had USC making it to the title game, and I believe that they all said that they would come in with a perfect record. The surprise came in when, first off, U of M did not come out of any of their mouths. Instead, both Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit put OSU in the title game. Not only that, but they also said that OSU would win and end the evil West Coast/USC empire! It’s nice to finally get some much deserved attention. Of course, the other two guys, Mark May and Trev Alberts, both looked at them like they were idiots. What else do you expect? They were the two that came down on OSU the hardest over the past few years.
BTW, sorry about being so silent the past few weeks. I’ve been busy doing other things, like homework. I’ve also been messing around with a program called MoveableType (used by LiveJournal) that I might employ in my blog so I don’t have to hand-edit the code for my web page every time I want to make an update. Not only that, but it would give me the ability to edit it from anywhere that had a web browser, instead of being anchored to my laptop.
One last thing. I will be coming home over Labor Day weekend, so if you want to get together, give me a call.
