USC handled Notre Dame 38-27 on the west coast last night, and Trojan quarterback Caleb Williams threw in a Heisman pose for good measure/insult to injury. This is because Williams did a lot of Heisman things on the national stage last night, throwing for one score and rushing for three more and, yes, probably locking up the gnarled little stiff-arming trophy.
Strangely, there were no howls about this from Domer Nation, which did not bay loudly for Irish coach Marcus Freeman's head or scream that the entire Notre Dame program needed to be stripped down to the studs and rebuilt.
I say "strangely," because apparently this is what you do when you lose a big rivalry game in convincing fashion.
Best evidence for this happened earlier in the day, when Michigan blackjacked Ohio State with one cross-country touchdown after another, and the Wolverines nearly doubled up the Buckeyes in a battle of the unbeatens. In the end, UM left Columbus on the high side of a 45-23 lamination, and the "battle" more resembled the Little Bighorn than D-Day in Normandy.
Almost immediately, embarrassed Billy Buckeyes began calling for Ohio State coach Ryan Day's head. A few especially deranged folks insisted the program was rotten to the core and needed a complete do-over.
More rational souls pointed out the Buckeyes were 11-0 going into the game, and were simply the victim of a horrendous defensive scheme at the worst possible time. Recognizing that Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh is a throwback who loves to ground-and-pound, the Buckeyes loaded the box and left their DBs to single Michigan's wideouts in man-to-man coverage.
It was a fatal undervaluing of UM's receivers, who ran like wild horses past those DBs. Cornelius Johnson caught touchdown passes of 69 and 75 yards from J.J. McCarthy, who likely couldn't believe what he was seeing. Colston Loveland caught another 45-yard bomb for a score. And when the Buckeyes bunched up even more to try to stop the Wolverines from grinding clock in the fourth quarter, Donovan Edwards exploited it with home-run jaunts of 75 and 85 yards.
Edwards had barely completed his last overland haul when the hollering from the scarlet-and-gray faithful began.
Again, more rational souls pointed out this was one bad game, and perhaps not an indictment of the program altogether. Day, for instance, is now 45-5 in four seasons and 31-2 in the Big Ten. He'd won 23 straight conference games until Harbaugh beat him last year. And he's now 15-5 against ranked teams.
The problem, of course, is the two Big Ten losses have both come against Michigan. This is THE unforgivable sin in Columbus, especially considering Day's predecessor, Urban Meyer, never lost to Michigan. Day, on the other hand, has never gotten his ass kicked by Iowa or Purdue, as Meyer did.
But Meyer won a national title and always beat Harbaugh, so he's worthy of statuary. Day, on the other hand, is worthy of a pink slip and a plane ticket out of town.
From that, you can be tempted to believe Ohio State fans wouldn't care if their Buckeyes went 7-5 every year as long as they beat Michigan. This is an exaggeration, of course, but it's probably not much of one.
In any event, yesterday there was a whole lot of hair-pulling and prisoner-of-the-moment-ing, which those of us not wearing scarlet-and-gray found amusing at the very least. You wanted to tell them the sky really wasn't falling and they needed to pump the brakes, but that of course would have fallen on deaf ears.
After all, Michigan didn't pump the brakes once all day. Why would you expect Billy Buckeye to?
No comments:
Post a Comment