By percentages, you don’t have a dog in the fight in the Michigan/Ohio State game, but no one leans on the rape stand and watches a bitter contest like this with the aloof demeanor of a neutral bystander. You get in there, but up into the crowd, and sidle up to the edge of the ring and throw some ducats on the hound of your choice. Like many dogfights, the Ohio State/Michigan game could be broken up in a flurry of tear gas and jogging policemen, so pick lively and be on your toes for the kickoff tomorrow with our handy guide

Drink:

This hat was made from the beer consumed between 10:14 a.m. and 10:46 a.m. From an ode to Busch Light.

IF: 24 pack of Busch light: THEN: Ohio State. We’ve never seen people drink more shitty beer with greater voracity than Ohio State fans. Never. (more…)

Jimbo Slice says this is how a lawya eat, and you best get over to the Alphabetical. This week’s topic include the metaphorical relationship between lobsters and USC, the Simpsons Completion Theorem, the Michigan fanbase doing it to themselves, they do, and that’s what really hurts, and kind words about the city of Athens, as close a place to actual live college heaven for all demographics as is humanly possible. Treason, you say, fellow Florida alums? Perhaps, but with Jimbo Slice on our side we fear nothing.

If it can’t be explained in five minutes with Paintbrush and graphics found on the internet, it cannot be known. This week’s question comes courtesy of…

Adam Rittenberg of ESPN, the resident Big Ten blogger, wonders why Ohio State gets the national Cleveland Steamer treatment for their performance in big games while Oklahoma receives little of the same treatment for their even worse performance record in big games, a bias reflected in this week’s polls and their inequal treatment of both teams.

But another national powerhouse deserves the same treatment. Another big-name has been just as disappointing in big games, if not worse. And yet that team continues to escape the hate. Meet the Oklahoma Sooners. They’re apparently made out of Teflon.

Untrue. This has nothing to do with anyone’s dislike of Tressel, or a curious anti-Buckeye slant to national coverage. As usual, this can be explained with some handy statistics and the visual scalpel wielded by truth itself on our planet, MS Paint. (Or as seen here, Mac Paintbrush. Same thing, more pompous platform.)

This is the United States. Most people live on the coasts, as indicated by the extremely scientific arrows.

There are more eyeballs toward the coasts, and thus more people to see your failures, document them, and mock you for them when they happen. Oklahoma has a far more impressive resume in the department of championship fail, and mimics OU’s pattern of winning their conference, getting to a BCS bowl, and then depositing a shovelful of ass vindaloo into their collective shorts on national television.

Why the especially harsh rhetoric towards Ohio State? (more…)

I have been stabbed by Texas, shot by Florida, poisoned by LSU, frozen by USC, hung, electrocuted, and burned by the media…and every morning I wake up without a scratch on me, not a dent in the fender… I am an immortal.

(See Chris’s post on Sweatervest at Doc Saturday. Jeremiad-y in its intensity, cold science in its accuracy.)

1. Uniforms. Columbus, Ohio is the kind of place where people, in one regard or another, still respect the notion of a uniform. This makes sense; this is where Professor Hayes wore a short sleeve white button down, a tie that appeared to be fitted for a man a full foot shorter than Hayes, geek glasses, a black hat, and pants pulled up to his navel no matter the weather, all the while wondering what particular handbasket the world had decided to go to hell in, and how he could put the hippies in it and send it to Gay Commie China or wherever the hell they wanted to take this fine, red-blooded America to in the first place.

Columbus is still the kind of place where people wear a uniform, and not just a code. (more…)

Perhaps you’re an emotional cripple like we are. If you’re male, this is doubly likely, since most men could not accurately pinpoint an actual emotion if held at gunpoint. “Happy? Sad? Hungry? All three? Yes. And horny. Add that one in there, too.” Aside from occasional drunken brushes with tears during random songs played at bars and the occasional commercial, though not necessarily that old Staples commercial where a husband is caught buying school supplies for his teacher wife even though they’re tightening up the belt at home, because crying gustily at that commercial would be for sissies, and THESE ALLERGIES ARE BECOMING OVERWHELMING. Excuse us.

[/loudsobbing, sound of swishing liquor in bottle.]

Ahem. To help you get in touch with your emotions leading up to the season, we thought we would help by offering the Jim Tressel Mood Chart. You may find yourself trapped in an awkward conversation where someone asks you about your feelings. This will be with a “woman,” probably a “wife,” “girlfriend,” or “prison psychiatrist.” They will all want answers, and because they may have sex with you in the future, you have to give them answers. Since your answers will be terrible, just point to something on this chart as a response.

The chart should yield multiple dividends. First, skirts take flight for the winter and and never return under the steely gaze of Jim Tressel: it’s foreplay and distraction in one efficient move. In addition to this, your wife/girlfriend/prison psych will assume you’re actually trying, and will likely call this “progress.” Finally, you can engage in this activity while spending mere seconds away from watching sweet, precious football. It combines emotional fraud and sex, and if the two of those things aren’t more arousing as a cocktail than as single, separate, shots, we don’t know what kind of emotional bar you’re frequenting.

(Product also applicable to women who, as outliers of their species, would rather be watching the game in between sexual encounters and meals, and are trapped with men who want to discuss these “emotions.” God bless each and every one of you and your golden haunches.)

Booming guitar riff–

Pictures of Columbus riverbanks as shot from helicopter–

TITLE–

Starring: his black friend with a helicopter and a sketchy guy with all the connections. It’s really impossible to describe how much we love this picture of Jim Tressel. It’s as if someone has taken our friendly local librarian and unveiled his secret identity as a CIA strongman running bales of blow and small arms out of a Surinamese warehouse on the side. It also may be so contagiously sexy it blows out a few pixels on your screen. Apologies if it does; please send all damage claims to the Ohio State Athletic Department, and they’ll tell you it’s not their fault if their coach makes ladies’ garters snap from fifty feet.

(HT: Eleven Warriors.)

Track guy: Here, Coach. Hold the starter’s pistol for the photo, okay? You ready to go?

Jim Tressel: Oh, I’m past ready. I’ve passed the point of no return. Do you know what that is? That’s the point in a journey where it’s longer to go back to the beginning. It’s like when those astronauts got in trouble. I don’t know, somebody messed up, and they had to get them back to Earth. But they had passed the point of no return. They were on the other side of the moon and were out of contact for like hours. Everybody waited to see if a bunch of dead guys in a can would pop out the other side. Well, that’s me. I’m on the other side of the moon now and everybody is going to have to wait until I pop out.

Track guy: Um, that’s just a starter’s pistol, Coach. It can’t kill anyone.

[/pause]

Tressel: Oh, um…very well. Great work you’re doing here. Have a great day. (whistles, walks away.)

(HT: Jeff via this.)

We join Jim Tressel in mid-press conference on the Big Ten Network. Let’s pop in and see what he’s saying!

Jim Tressel: We’ve got a lot of people to replace on this team. Can you imagine how you guys would feel if you lost a third of the people in your company?

Tressel: Yeah, except we can replace our guys.

Reporters: [silence]

Tressel: Wait, there really are fewer of you. I just thought you were all out filling out law school applications, getting gastric bypass surgery, but good great googly moogly–it looks like someone served plague for dinner last week in here.

Reporter1: It’s been hard. (more…)

From your offseason “Has Jim Tressel Lost His Ability To Swing It Like A New Jack” article of the year, please see this intriguing detail from his contract:

Tressel, 56, continually swats aside questions about how long he’ll coach. Yet his new contract—which goes through the 2012 season—has an interesting addition: If he decides to retire, the university can keep him on as a professor for up to five years.

Like Woody Hayes before him, he would be “Professor Tressel.” Oh, the possibilities.

–”Michigan Real Estate: Owning It And How To Keep It for Half-Decades At A Time.”

–”Menswear for Caucasians: Theory and Practice.”

–”Don’t Call It A Quagmire: American Victories In Vietnam”

–”Coach Tress’s Gymnastics for Late Bloomers.”

–”Handling Radioactive Materials Safely and Easily With Everyday Objects Found In Your Home and Office.”

–”Paradise Lost: Herbert Hoover’s America.”

–”Special Seminar on Pyongyang: Come for the Women, Stay for the Women”

In quasi-related news, Professor Tressel is doing swimmingly on the recruiting trail, and may bring in the number one recruiting class if Ramgod dictates that Rueben Randle goes somewhere else other than LSU. Ohio State has 16 four star recruits, with an emphasis on getting game-breakers at the edge like Duron Carter, who has speed to burn according to Scout.com!

He’s not a burner, though, and won’t make many guys miss.

Or not! To be fair, James Jackson is in there, too, though, a 4.31 guy as clocked by the obligatorily generous stopwatch guy who inhabits all recruiting boards slashing tenths off seconds. Also, Carter is a legacy, as he is the son of Cris Carter, who will now stalk the Ohio State sidelines berating Jim Tressel on-camera anytime his son is not on the field for any reason. BUT HE’S WORKING ON THE SPEED THING, CITIZENS OF UZBUCKISTAN. And that is your lesson for the day.