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.
Wisconsin brawled Arkansas into defeat; Penn State played slowball with Tennessee and earned a definitive Outback win. But they're a week further out And this means what? More practice, more time reviewing tape, more new stuff, more emphasis on the fundamentals, more time to reach into the circuitry and tweak the machine.
Think economically: if Ohio State lost something with a 55 day layoff, they sure gained as much in potential preparation time. If they twirked it right, that is; 41-14 says they didn't. (By the way, um, we didn't just tell the world our new locker combo, right? 'Cause our social studies book is in there, and we read the timelines for fun.)
--The speed fallacy rears its ugly head again. Didn't take long for this one to seep back in...um...quickly after the game. To say Florida players are faster than Ohio State players is to engage in inexactitude. Our players across the lines are certainly as fast as Ohio State's, and are in a particularly gross imbalance along the offensive line speedwise. That's accurate.
However, Pittman looked anything but slow on his touchdown run (the only offensive touchdown for Ohio State in the game, handed to them on a short field. 83 yards! 83 yards! WOOOOOOOOO!!!!) Ginn blipped into the endzone on the opening kickoff like someone edited in a jump-cut. Ohio State isn't slow, but they certainly lack speed along the defensive line and offensive line.
Speed isn't a regional birthright, which is what is really at the core of the argument bandied about on boards and the WWL. It's a matter of scouting and talent allocation, something Ohio State has already begun working on we'd wager, if Tressel's ass is as red as it should be from last night's wire-hanger-whoopin'.
It's also a matter of protection, which OSU never adjusted on to give Smith easy reads, and Smith vaporizing several million dollars of bonus money in a single night of maddening frustration. There! For those who thought we could get through this whole piece without hurling a brick at the offensive coordinator, there's your peaches.
That said, Florida looks to get freaky meth-fast like NOW. The base of this team--[NAME REDACTED] credit given repeatedly by everyone and anyone--would not have earned a ticket without two handpicked Meyer recruits: Tebow and Percy Harvin. Harvin's just the first in a wave of what Meyer wants to be the fastest roster in college football. Riley Cooper's just breaking into the game, a freshman wideout who's Ricky Bobby fast. C.J. Spiller, newly "homesick," is transferring to Florida. You may remember the game where he ran backwards through time to score against Georgia Tech--he's so ffast you have to spell ffast with two ffs.
It's a program accent only possible through someone described as "detail-oriented." You may, reading this from your dungheap of a desk, wonder what this "detail-oriented" looks like. See the picture heading this article. A thousand little taps broke this dam, and it takes a madman for the tiniest of wrinkles to see something like that through. Meyer wants more speed. We'll have it at punter by the time he's through.