We were never kind enough. Clear out a space on the Ring. And thanks.

The rapid fire edition: assault all bourgeois nostrums of football analysis!!!

–Anyone catch Urb’s boss-ass leather Members’ Only-cut National Champs jacket? If ever there was a man who looked at one with a banded collar windbreaker done in pleather, it’s Urban.

You can almost hear the Toto playing from the car when you look at that jacket. Roseanna…

–The postgame effluvia from the WWL–who barely covered the buildup to the game, saw the huge story, and then ran like a hungry sow for the slop barrel–contained more than its due share of nonsense. Corso, most notably, damned the Gators with faint praise and then credited the 55 day layoff for Ohio State’s flat performance, repeating as if he were brain-damaged:55 days, 55 days, 55 days.

Other Big Ten Teams dealt with a similar layoff and faced SEC teams with success. (more…)

This is going to be all over the place. Beginning in no particular order…

–Did Tressel watch a single minute of game film on Florida’s offense? Florida withers under blitz; him big ape, me call blitzes. Instead OSU opens each series with three down lineman, including some sets with a linebacker at the nose tackle position. They begged for the short-passing, highly accurate Leak to undo the sutures of their defense and let it bleed.

Coach Heacock, this space-age device could change your life.

This might not have been a disastrous strategy had Leak not been tossing the ball down hallways. The dbs seemed horrified of giving up anything over seven yards, playing miles off the ball on the snap and allowing Florida receivers to catch the ball in space. If this phrase sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s in your pablum detector for announcers, who use this verbiage to describe any short passing attack. Like, say, Florida’s. Who’d been called that all year.

A failure of imagination, gameplanning, and execution for Ohio State doomed them on defense. When they held soft zone, it was over. Next time, watch some tape. Or call someone. Or hell, pick up a controller and give NCAA 2007 a whirl. You’d think a team familiar with shattering Michigan’s soft zones would be the last to allow a team to do this, or create a gameplan begging for such treatment. Bear, meet trap.

–On defense Florida needed no coaching accomplices. (Negative superlative coming! Cliche warning issued.) Troy Smith played the worst game of his life and any other Heisman Winner in a big game, dipping below the Toretta line with the damning evidence listed in agate type for all to see:

4-14 completions 35 yards 0 TDs/ 1 INT

We imagined his agent creaming cellphone batteries, bluetooth light in his ear accentuating the panic, wearing out blackberries and reaching for holstered backups in an attempt to counter the ugly reality unfolding in front of him with carefully leaked leads to sympathetic sportswriters.

Cancer. Can we fake cancer? Sure, Lance Armstrong did it, right? That’s plan A, man. Then we go to dead relative–does he have a dead one? A really recently dead one? Or injury. He’s got to have a few. It’s gotta be something severe, like fractured ass, or cerebral ebola. Hell, cerebral ebola might actually up his signing bonus–what linebacker’s gonna want to touch someone with something called cerebral ebola? Phyllis! Get me the number of the CDC…

Earl Everett needs no helmet, and does not fear your cerebral ebola.

Smith should have more attempts on the books, and in reality did–five became sacks, and one became a fumble to set up Tim Tebow’s gotcha TD pass at the goal line. Ohio State’s tackles redefined late on Monday night, with Derrick Harvey and Jarvis Moss blowing tight curves around the edges to pressure Smith every time he had the ball.

Jarvis Moss: walking and talking on Facebook. He likes Heisemens.

If Marcus Thomas had laid off the GHB and stayed with the team, the numbers–horror of horrors–could have been worse. (more…)

AP–Glendale, Arizona. Heisman Trophy winner Troy Smith was injured early Tuesday morning in an impromptu game of touch football in the parking lot of University of Phoenix stadium. Smith suffered a strained knee, which will likely not affect his performance in the NFL combines this spring.

Smith, leaving the scene of the Buckeyes’ 41-14 defeat at the hands of the Florida Gators, said he was just trying to interact with fans and help himself forget what had just happened.

“There were a few kids standing around the trailers, and I thought, you know, give them a little something to remember, mix with the fans. Blow off some steam and make a positive out of a negative, you know.”

Smith approached the youths, who gladly worked him into the game.

“He just seemed so sad. So we let him play,” said Gator fan Kieran Woodley of Orange Park, FL. “He thought we were just going to be playing touch, though.”

Smith played a position known as “all-time qb” for three downs on the field, actually a stretch of parking lot with trailers for boundaries and with light posts marking the endzones. Smith played three downs before he was injured by young Gator fan Ryan Thomas, a scrappy nine-year old from Lakeland, Florida and cousin of the aforementioned Woodley.

Woodley and Thomas, left to right, injured Smith in the parking lot.

“On first down, I ran after him and he threw the ball into my uncle’s RV. Chips went everywhere and my aunt screamed. It was awesome. (more…)

We’ll do a few of these today. Click to access the EDSBS shop for any of ‘em.

Overwhelmed with emotion–simply overwhelmed. 41 out of 50 AP sportswriters can go choke themselves with a Twizzler right now. After five minutes, this game was out of reach. It’s not that Florida was merely good–they were flawless and magnificent like anyone who’s ever appeared on The Actor’s Studio with James Lipton. Chris Leak played a magnificent game-no Evil Chris, lurking in the shadows in the third quarter. No blocked punt, a la Auburn. No improbable decisions.

(Chris…we’re so sorry. We’re so, so sorry.)

And it’s not that Ohio State was bad–they were pathetic. Odious. Null. Reeking. Inert. They had no answer, no adjustments, no nothing. Alex Boone and Kirk Barton spent all night reaching backwards into the void where Derrick Harvey and Jarvis Moss should have been, and instead turning over to look at Troy Smith, eyes wide as dinner plates, turning away from one 270 lb. man attempting to kill him to find another 270 lb. beast running at him with 4.7 speed. His line becomes a paragraph unto itself:

Troy Smith: 4-14, 35 yards. 0 TDs, 1 INT. Sacks: 5

Heisman! UF outplayed them in every single facet of the game. No Ted Ginn excuses, no blown calls, nothing. Florida kicked ass until their toes fell off. It was like watching a small animal get crushed between two glaciers. It was like watching Roy Jones in his prime boxing an Olsen twin. It was like watching Clarence Darrow squaring off against Starr Jones in the courtroom. It was defeat, served rare, with a side of raw loss.

And for us: scoreboard, bitches. Scoreboard. We. Win.