All posts in NCAA

Please welcome our friend from Ohio, Brittany Gibbons. You may know her as the Barefoot Foodie or one of the founders of Mouth Media. We know her as awesome.

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When I was little, I won a rabbit at the fair after popping three balloons in a row with a dart.

My parents were pissed, but I loved that rabbit, carnie mange and all.

One summer day, I put the rabbit in our fenced backyard to frolic around and do rabbit stuff, and completely forgot about it until dinner. By the time I went out back to get him, I couldn’t find Norman Bates (I was a weird kid) anywhere.

I was hysterical, and my parents told me that Norman Bates probably saw some of his bunny friends and climbed over the fence to be free.

Every morning, for a week, I left a plate of carrots and lettuce in the backyard, in the hopes that he would return.

He never did.

Years later, my dad finally admitted that he had left the gate open and Norman was hit by a car. But I refused to believe him, and demanded that he describe what the dead bunny on the road looked like, because there was no way it had been Norman Bates.

Jim Tressel is my Norman Bates.

I’ve had 120 days to digest that he is gone, but until I saw his guts splattered across the front end of a car, I still couldn’t grasp that every Saturday, he won’t be on the field in his vest and headset.

Last week, playing Miami, I saw the roadkill. In fact, I smelled it. And it stunk.

We Buckeyes aren’t used to this. We are used to dominating the game despite our excessive penalties, making it to either the National Championship or a prestigious bowl game, and then blowing it. This is how we do things.

We opened our season plowing through Akron, just eking by Toledo, and then, last week, falling to Miami and falling from the NCAA ranking.

What the fuck, y’all!?

So this is what this feels like?

A whole suck ass season paying the piper for greedy, entitled first stringers and our demi-God enabler of a coach.

Things looked bleak, until yesterday. Coming off a painful 24-6 loss to Miami, Interim Coach Fickell swapped out starting senior QB Joe Bauserman, for freshman Braxton Miller in their match against Colorado, and from the moment he took the field, it was clear he was going to be running the show for the rest of the season. What he didn’t complete in passes he made up for in foot work and mobility. He reminded me of a young Troy Smith. You may remember him (cough cough, Heisman winner). With Miller at the helm, OSU pounded out a 37-17 win over Colorado, finally lighting a fire under what felt like a hot mess of a offense last week.

Does this mean Ohio State going to re-emerge this year, nabbing a Big Ten Title? I don’t know. But if you listen really closely, you can hear the entire state of Ohio exhaling.