#11 Ohio State @ Toledo
Ohio State IS Johnny Cash IN Walk the Line. Jim Tressel, you can’t just keep doing the same songs over and over? And you sure as hell can’t do it in front of a rabid crowd of people who’ve killed people? You are incorrect, record executive/football pundit. Sweatervest will trot out his shufflin’, two-note bass line lovin’ Tennessee Trio of an offense again and again until someone puts his head in the John Cooper memorial guillotine, confidently plowing ahead with convention in front of an audience condemned to imprisonment. (more…)

I’ve always wanted to hunt the most dangerous game . . . Ohio State fans.

Senator Blutarsky laid down the challenge, and T. Kyle King, who hates Auburn — boy, does he ever hate Auburn — responded with every bit of the gusto you’d expect and then some. So now the only question is, is 100 Things Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die just an Auburn thing, or is this book part of a series? Naturally, it’s the latter, meaning that in addition to a team-specific tailgating tent, leather sofa, or casket, you can now have a bucket list tailored to the college football team of your choice.

Even leaving out all the baseball-themed volumes — is “Stay awake through an entire MLB game” on any of those lists? It should be — we don’t have the time to slog through every one of these books, much less the resources to buy all of ‘em. But that ain’t gonna stop us from making some educated guesses as to what’s on each list. Here’s what we’d include, if we were instructing individual fan bases as to how they can optimize their respective fandoms before shuffling off their respective mortal coils:

ALABAMA
* Pick three random years out of the past century and make a case for Alabama deserving a share of the national title in each of those years in a letter to the editor, comment on a rival blog, or graffito spray-painted on an opposing team’s stadium.
* Get a houndstooth-patterned prosthesis or medical implant (i.e. hip replacement, pacemaker, or IUD).
* Cut off an Auburn fan’s ear whilst listening to Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You.”

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(Before you ask: We will never tire of this photo. Ever. We pray to Football Jesus (there’s a separate one for football) every night that Zibby goes into coaching so we can post it once a week.)

Moving on: The combine, like childbirth, is a natural process, a rite of passage, and not at all creepy or gross. Nope:

With that, the player is ready to run. He peels away a pair of mesh shorts and the compression pair underneath reveal a set of quad muscles akin to a mountain ridge. [NorthJersey.com]

“In between workouts and class, I usually get a massage, have a chef come over to prepare meals, and different stuff like that,” said Freeman, an OSU senior linebacker. [The Lantern]

But what’s not true, he says, is the unavoidable association between Berkeley and marijuana — “Come on, man, you lived in Berkeley — tell the truth,” a scout reportedly said to Follett in an interview after he had denied ever smoking pot. [The Daily Cal]

“Everyone wants to talk about (Georgia’s) Matthew Stafford , I’ve been at camps and thrown with him,” Hoyer said. “But I feel like my arm is just as strong or just a little bit below his.” [Detroit News]

“[Loadholt] struggles to bend, and he struggles with any kind of elite speed. Orakpo ran by him all day long.” [Tulsa World]

“The doctor looks at my sheet and said, ‘Did you actually play?’ I told him I was a long snapper. Yeah, I just snap and take a leisurely jog down the field.” [Freep]

You’re damn right Woody Hayes did interviews in the nude. All great men at one point work in the nude in a non-sexual manner. Orde Wingate, mad chief of the Chindits in Burma in WW2, used to conduct meetings in the buff while cleaning himself with a brush. (Mike Bellotti does the same thing, but with a loofa and a toothbrush for the hard to reach places.) Lyndon Johnson would display his penis in Vietnam-era Oval Office briefings, point to it, and ask “Does How Chi Minh have this?” We ourselves never blog in the nude, a reason why this blog isn’t three thousand times better than it is. We’ll be sure to put this in beta testing after our vacation.

Woody Hayes nude: censored because he was illegally beautiful.

Go ahead and call him ugly, Leonard…

“If the team lost or tied, he would conduct an interview in the nude,” said Downie, as reported in The Lantern. “He was an ugly guy so it would clear the locker room out pretty fast.”

But can’t you balance that with the kind of womanly compliment usually following a statement like this, as in “he was ugly…but Woody was always sexy,” or “A post-loss nude Woody Hayes conference was like staring into the sun: so intense and powerful you could only endure a few seconds of its awesome grandeur?” Mighty uncharitable, as we’re sure Professor Hayes, while lacking physical grandeur, had his own ramshackle physical charm about him. (”He has nice forearms! His eyes: have you seen his eyes?”)

As opposed to a Pete Carroll nude press conference, where presumably reporters would leave in tears of joy and awe saying things like, “It was so…beautiful…”, “like David, but better hung,” and “It was like watching a new child enter the world, but without the shitting and hideous afterbirth.”

[SCENE: KELLY AND TODD'S HOUSE. Game night. They have invited JIM and BOB over for a game the whole family can enjoy because Trivial Pursuit is only fun for smart people.]

Bob: So, how does this work?

Kelly: Okay, Bob and Jim. In the fun-for-everyone game of Cranium, the final round is decided by one question we determine at random with a roll of the die.

Jim: Sounds easy enough. And familiar. (more…)

It’s the weirdest thing.

I feel like I’ve been in a coma for fifteen days…and I’m just now waking up.

Spec-tac-u-lar.

RE-MATCH! RE-MATCH! RE-MATCH! RE-MATCH! RE-MATCH!

ESPN had this headline up for most of yesterday, and it bugged the hell out of me all day:

That’s just lazy, and maddeningly vague.   There’s nineteen different ways this could’ve been more informative, and they went with a grand total of none of them.  “Sealed for your protection”?  “Detour ahead”?  “Not to be used as a flotation device”?

We’re here to help, after the jump:

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The weekend in Gamblor-baiting, divided into half-reasoned predictions and blind contempt.

#5 OSU @ #1 USC

ORSON, QUASI-RATIONAL: USC. We’ll all look like idiots for picking USC for the first quarter, the first quarter when Mark Sanchez struggles a bit, the Buckeyes actually stick to the run in a big game for a while, and the Buckeye defense zeroes in on USC’s innovative “first down boot PA pass” call, which they make every damn time they hold the ball.

Then, the ice weasels come for Ohio State, and they come at halftime. The run game will stall; USC’s offense will find holes underneath in the zone, or counter OSU’s blitzes with screens and slants; and then it’s all tears and replay from there as this rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem in the second half. Then, they’ll have to rely on Todd Boeckman passing them back into the game to survive. This means they die.

HOLLY, QUASI-RATIONAL:  USC. Can the argument be made that for the past two weeks Ohio State has been operating out of a third of its playbook, saving all the fancy Pryor packages for the game that’ll swing their title hopes the most?  Of course.  But if Tressel’s got something that gamebreaking up his tiny sleeves, I find it very hard to believe he’ll choose the Coliseum as a staging ground to see whether or not any of it works.  If last week’s game had truly been the cakewalk we all expected, the Buckeyes would’ve been able to wrest control handily once things started to careen the way of the Bobcats.  They did not.

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“It is the still, small voice that the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom.”

In a swift response to the outcry surrounding Ohio State University’s decision to do away with a seniority-based system for allotment of alumni football tickets in favor of a lottery, the school is asking its former students to step into the spotlight.  An Ohio State University Alumni Association announced this afternoon that it would be instituting a merit-based system and awarding the vast majority of its available seats for conference games to winners of the Brent Musberger’s Balls Memorial THAAAAH BUCKEEYYYEESSSH Spirit Pageant and Covered Dish Supper, to be held on campus the last week of July.  The contest is open to all Ohio State University alumni and members of their immediate family.  Below, the frontrunners for all major categories:

Lead Pipe Twirling:  Priscilla Abernathy, 10, Upper Arlington

The pageant’s youngest entrant hopes to prove to her father, Dillard, that even lacking the requisite chromosomes she can be the son he told her he always wanted.  She wowed judges at last April’s Columbus Cotillion with her deft handling of even the rustiest metal shards.

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