And now, a brief pause for speculation

Give Urban Meyer this much: He's not squeamish about style points when the situation seems to demand them.

And so his Ohio State Buckeyes laid it on Wisconsin last night, and then laid it on some more, and then laid it on  a little more. And when the laying on was done, the Badgers were nothing more than a faint smudge on the Lucas Oil Stadium turf, having been mercilessly ground up 59-0 in the Big Ten title game by a third-string quarterback and an Ohio State team determined to make a statement so loud even the College Football Playoff committee could hear it.

But was it loud enough?

Hard to say. The Buckeyes sit on the doorstep of the playoff right now, and they could still be sitting there later this week. Because, if you're the committee, whom do you jump them over?

Defending national champion Florida State, which finished off a 13-0 regular season with a 37-35 win over No. 11 Georgia Tech in the ACC title game? Or TCU, which came into Saturday in the No. 3 slot and surely didn't hurt itself by pounding unranked Iowa State 55-3?

That's the dilemma here, and the Blob still says the committee will resolve it by standing pat. Although Ohio State has beaten more ranked teams (most by double digits) and have won 12 games against teams with a collective won-lost record of 84-60 (far better than either TCU or Florida State), those are credentials that haven't yet gotten the Buckeyes into the top four. Yet now, suddenly, they will?

What's killed the Buckeyes so far is the relative weakness of the Big Ten, and that didn't change Saturday night (to be sure, it might have actually hurt them that Wisconsin, the presumptive second best team in the conference, was so clearly inferior). On the other hand, they are crushing everybody, and Saturday night they did do it with a third-string QB. So maybe the committee concludes that, while they weren't a top-four team prior to 11:30 p.m. or so Dec. 6, they clearly had become one thereafter.

The skinny: A couple weeks or so ago the Blob opined that it just couldn't see any way the Buckeyes got in. Now it can.

So they've got that going for them.