It was another exciting week in college football this weekend. The top teams are starting to move themselves from the rest of the pack, and just in time as the first BCS poll came out Sunday night.
Now here are some highlights from this weekend’s games:
Oklahoma State 38, Texas 26
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.
We are happy to feature a guest post from Jennifer Doyle at Playgroups are No Place for Children.
Now I realize that many of you don’t live in Knoxville. As most southerners do, we take our football seriously here in Knoxville where we worship at the alter of the University of Tennessee Volunteers. As much as we love our football team, we’re no fools. This isn’t going to be their year to win the SEC Championship, let alone the NCAA Championship. (And really, we know that next year probably won’t be their year either and frankly, we don’t hold much hope for the next several seasons.) We love them anyway and we love talking about them.
Vol football makes up the majority of our sports programming in the fall. They’re all that’s talked about on TV, local sports talk radio, the newspaper, and blogs from August until January. That’s a lot of time to fill and with a team that is less than spectacular, even the little of things related to the Vols will make the news. That, and the not so little things. Enter: Coach Derek Dooley’s orange pants.
I had to take a double take on the Vols season opener against Montana on September 3rd. With my mouth full of Arroz Con Pollo (what? Doesn’t everyone eat homemade Cuban food to watch college football?), I thought I saw Derek Dooley standing on the sidelines wearing what looked to me like orange pants. Upon second look, yes, he was indeed wearing orange pants.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one who was mesmerized? puzzled? shocked? by Coach Dooley’s fashion choice. A Facebook page devoted to his fancy pants has well over 25,000 fans. These pants are a hot topic here in Knoxville, aside from the football purists who insist that the news coverage of his pants when we could be talking about how to get their defense to, you know, defend, has gone on long enough. The thing is, we haven’t stopped talking about them because he keeps wearing them, each week.
Some fans were convinced that the orange pants held magical powers after the Vols won their first two games. That all went out the window when Florida beat the Vols on September 17th for the seventh straight year.
Rumors flew after the first sighting of the orange pants regarding their cost. One such number that was thrown around was that these custom tailored pants cost was the very precise, $1,423.32. Made of woven wool from England and dyed three times to get just the right shade of orange, these pants were made by a local retailer, John H. Daniel Clothing. Metropulse.com published a screencap of a video released by UT regarding the making of these pants, showing the what appeared to be that price on an invoice.
This price has has since been refuted by the tailor and the Knoxville News Sentinel sports editor.
Fans of the Tennessee Vols will soon be able to get their very own orange pants off the rack to show their team spirit, just in time for Halloween costume season.
Jennifer Doyle is a freelance writer living in Knoxville, TN. She’s a huge fan the UT Vols, but she’s is easily distracted during games by all the snacks. She runs a local website, Family Friendly Knoxville, is the Editorial Director of Story Bleed Magazine, and a writer for Babble.com. In her abundant spare time, she chronicles her life on her personal blog, Playgroups are No Place for Children.
Take a look at this week’s AP Top 25 list, as clipped from espn.com just a day ago.
Notice anything missing? No? Here’s a hint:
Yep, the Buckeyes — my Buckeyes — have dropped out of the AP Top 25 for the first time since November 2004.
Saturday night’s dismal effort against Miami earned the latest banishment from the AP poll (they dropped out of the coaches’ poll too). The unranked Hurricanes made Ohio State look as bad as the Akron team that lost in the season opener in Columbus a couple weeks ago.
Against the Zips? OSU rolled up 517 yards of total offense. Joe Bauserman and Braxton Miller combined for 20 completions on 28 attempts, four touchdowns and no interceptions.
Most of the folks in Columbus wrote off a scary game against Toledo pass as a combination of looking ahead to Miami and playing a top-tier MAC team that’s pretty good.
Turns out that wasn’t the case, and Ohio State was exposed on Saturday night. The same two quarterbacks were a combined 4 of 18, which was good for 35 yards.
Thirty. Five. Yards.
And now we get to the point in the post where we mention the obvious: investigations and suspensions. The Miami game was the season’s first for three players — including guys projected to be starters at tailback and corner — for accepting envelopes with a little spending money at an offseason charity event. And then there are the Tat Five; a reserve player missed just one game, but three more — the team’s best tailback, its best receiver and its starting left tackle — don’t get to see the field for another three weeks.
And the departure of that fifth guy — the one whose name shall not be written but is now an Oakland Raider – has left a bigger hole at quarterback than I had feared. After the Akron game, I had hopes that Bauserman would be respectable started until Miller, a true freshman who will eventually remind everyone of last year’s starter, was ready to take over. But in the last two weeks, Bauserman has looked awful and Miller is played like a freshman. And given that the team opens the conference in two weeks — with games against Michigan State and at Nebraska and Illinois — I’m thinking this season is going to remind Ohio State fans of 2004 in more ways than dropping from the AP poll.
It’s a little hard to remember 2004 — after all, the team was 56-11 since the last time it fell from the AP rankings late that season (68-11, if you count the 2010 season, which most in Columbus still do). Let me remind you:
The Buckeyes were 8-4 in 2004. A string of three-straight losses in October weren’t quite enough to move them out of the Top 25, but a loss at Purdue did the trick. They finished strong, upsetting Michigan and thumping Oklahoma State in the Alamo Bowl — even with new starter Troy Smith sitting out because of his own NCAA suspension — but that was a rough year.
In Columbus, it’s looking like this one could be too.
One good thing about writing the weekly college football recap is that I don’t have to write about my Sun Devils losing and dropping out of the Top 25. I can pretend that it just didn’t happen and make fun of Buckeyes fans instead.
And on to the highlights from the weekend’s games!
Boise State 40, Toledo 15
Boise State continues to win, and win big. I for one thought they’d start the season off losing big to Georgia and finally show they couldn’t play with the big boys. But they proved me wrong. I’ll still always hate them, though, for Dirk Koetter.
South Carolina 24, Navy 21
The Gamecocks squeaked out yet another close win and they did it on the legs of sophomore running back Marcus Lattimore, who racked up a season-high 246 yards rushing against the Midshipmen. And the Gamecocks needed every single one of those yards to eek out the win.
Notre Dame 31, Michigan State 13
Notre Dame finally got a notch in the win column for 2011 by upsetting the 15-th ranked Michigan State Spartans. The Irish were finally ready this week and used two touchdowns from Cierre Wood and an 89-yard kickoff return George Atkinson III for a touchdown to propel them to victory.
Miami (FL) 24, Ohio State 6
I’m never sad when THE Ohio State gets beaten, nee UPSET. And even better, it knocked the nuts out of the Top 25 for the first time in seven years. This was also the first time in 23 years that the Buckeyes lost a road game to an unranked non-conference opponent. Since my team lost, at least this OSU loss was a boost to my spirits.
Clemson 38, Auburn 24
In a battle of the Tigers, the National Champions and their 17-game winning streak are history, after the Clemson Tigers upset the 21st-ranked Auburn Tigers. With the narrow victories Auburn has been lucky to come by this season, it wasn’t all that surprising.
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Kristabella really needs to start writing these recaps on Saturday night.
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