Sprinkling A Little Spice On Tressel’s Vanilla

Vanilla is a perfectly good flavor for ice cream. For a major college football offense, however, vanilla is not a popular flavor. Vanilla is a sports metaphor for conservative, bland and predictable, and when some teams are averaging 30, 40, even 50 points per game, vanilla seems a pretty fair assessment for a team that [...]

Five Candidates To Get Ohio State’s Offense Going

It really doesn’t matter whether Jim Tressel, Jim Bollman or Granny Nevada is calling the plays. When push comes to shove in the red zone, it’s the offensive scheme and not so much individual play calls that mean the difference between touchdowns and field goals.

Whether or not you believe the intimation that Tressel may tweak [...]

Other Teams Besides Ohio State Relying On Freshmen

While Ohio State fans continue to debate the merits of keeping freshman Terrelle Pryor as the one and only playing quarterback on the team, there are other coaches throughout the nation who have decided to make dazzling freshmen the focal parts of their teams.

That includes Boise State, the only other ranked team with a [...]

A Buckeye Nation Divided

If you think the country is divided less than a week before the presidential election, you haven’t taken the pulse of the Buckeye Nation lately.

After Ohio State fell 13-6 at home to third-ranked Penn State, battle lines that had been forming since the team’s mid-September loss at USC are now fully defined. It seems [...]

History On Ohio State’s Side Vs. Penn State

“I know no way of judging the future but by the past.”
– Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

It is more than slightly amusing to watch and listen to the nattering nabobs prattle on about how Ohio State has almost no chance to slow down the juggernaut that has become Penn State.

My rebuttal to them is simple: [...]

Woody Had It Right … Again

Woody Hayes once said the most popular person in Columbus was Ohio State’s backup quarterback. That was just one more thing the old man was right about.

Just since Jim Tressel has been head coach, the Buckeye Nation has clamored for Craig Krenzel during the Steve Bellisari era, Scott McMullen during the Krenzel era, Troy Smith [...]

Just Birthday Blogging Today

A couple of biggies celebrate birthdays today – All-America running back Keith Byars and All-America basketball player Jim Jackson.

Keith Alan Byars was born Oct. 14, 1963, in Dayton, Ohio, and became a multisport star at Roth High School. He signed with Buckeyes in 1982, and as a junior in 1984 had one of [...]

Ohio State’s Offensive Woes Not Unexpected

Sputtering, stumbling, staggering, wheezing, foundering, floundering, flummoxing – pick your word to describe what many fans are now deploring as the late, great Ohio State offense.

My question to those who want to storm the castle and demand that Jim Tressel relinquish his play-calling duties: Just exactly what did you expect?

The Buckeyes are breaking in a [...]

A Few Random Thoughts

It’s pretty easy to draw comparisons between Terrelle Pryor and Ohio State’s last great quarterback except Pryor got the job much quicker than Troy Smith.

Smith always seemed to be a work in progress despite the fact he attended the Elite 11 quarterback camp before his senior year in high school. Because of his size, no [...]

Times Have Changed In Cheeseland

My first visit to Camp Randall Stadium was in 1990, one of those early years in the John Cooper era. That was back when it always seemed Ohio State got within a whisker of going to the Rose Bowl only to lose to Michigan and wind up playing at 11 o’clock in the morning on [...]