Ohio State will win tonight

Back on December 3, the day after the BCS pairings were announced, the always eloquent Sunday Morning Quarterback had an excellent post about LSU and SEC fan hubris in anticipation of the Mythical Championship Game showdown between the Buckeyes and the Tigers. I meant to blog about it earlier, but never got around to it. Now, with the game mere hours away, seems like the perfect time to finally do so. Quoth SMQ:

The worst result of last year's mythical championship game was the growth and perpetuation of this absurd notion of superior "SEC speed," based not on the collective 40 times and shuttle drills of hundreds of players on a couple dozen teams that make up the SEC and Big Ten, but on a handful of plays in a single game that was decidedly outside the season-long patterns of both participants, and not demonstrably decided by "speed" (unless you're willing to suggest Tennessee and Arkansas were done in a week earlier by "speed," too, which was at least as plausible). ...

One would think the false sense of inevitability that followed Ohio State prior to last year's championship (or USC the year before that, or that very, very fast Miami team in 2002, or, I don't know, LSU, Ohio State, West Virginia, USC, Oregon, Michigan, Oklahoma, California, Florida or LSU again prior to stunning upsets over the last three months) would demonstrate the virtues of humility to fans everywhere, and lead them to stop for a second to recognize - last year's anomalous championship beatdown is a great example of this - that anything can happen in one game, on one night, and "anything" will not necessarily reconcile itself with the accumulation of disparate performances that precedes it. It only adds to the accumulation; it doesn't define it. Based on everything we know from the dozen "samples" on both sides leading up to last January, that Florida team couldn't beat that Ohio State team by 27 points again in a whole season of trying. There's a reason the Gators were underdogs, and it's not because they kept the fast guys under wraps when squeaking out wins against South Carolina and Vanderbilt.

Based on everything we know from both teams' performances this season, Ohio State and LSU should be a close, hard-hitting game between two of the few teams that still operate largely from traditional two-back sets on offense and do not hesitate to run old-fashioned isos, counters and traps into the line. It's an interesting collision of style and persona between loose cannon Les Miles and icy, understated mercenary Jim Tressel, and their emphases on emotion, "poise" (as Miles likes to repeat to his oft-flagged charges) and discipline. But it will be decided by the side that executes and catches the right breaks under the specific set of circumstances that unfold on Jan. 7, at which point, of course, that team will be instantly refashioned into gold-drenched superheroes with inherent abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Naturally: We are the champions! These are the myths we make.

But the athletes, the speed, all of that is a given. LSU and Ohio State have both turned in top ten recrutiting classes each of the last four seasons. They've all got the athletes. They've all got the speed. The differences in raw talent on this level are nil. This championship, like all championships, will be about combining management, strategy and execution in the moment, and probably a bounce or timely flag or two. Not as catchy as "SEC Speed," but anything more precise than wrongheaded, bumper sticker hubris rarely is.

Indeed.

Anyway, you may notice that in the title of this post, I'm going out on a limb, aligning myself with the 27 out of 90 Bowl Pick 'em contestants and 25.3 percent of ESPN readers who believe the Buckeyes will prevail. I am predicting this not because I'm pro-OSU but because I'm anti-CW (conventional wisdom, that is), and I see no particular reason to believe that Ohio State can't win this game. This isn't an SEC-Big Ten Challenge (which the former would certainly win), it's a game between two specific teams from those conferences, and while I won't be particularly surprised if either one wins -- such is the chaotic nature of college football, especially this season -- I think a Buckeye blowout would be the perfect conclusion to the season, in the sense that it would turn conventional wisdom on its head one last time. And the Buckeyes certainly have plenty of motivation, while the homestanding Bayou Bengals could easily fall into the trap of reading their press clippings a bit too much. Also, for the love of God, I don't think I can handle the SEC chest-thumping if the Tigers win. So: Ohio State 27, LSU 10.

Oh, and the talk about a split national championship? Forget about it. This is, as I keep saying, a Mythical Championship Game in the sense that there's no particularly compelling reason to believe that these are actually the two best teams in the country, but at the same time, nobody else stands out as being worthy, either. The problem this year, unlike in all past BCS controversies, isn't that there are too many championship-worthy teams, it's that there are too few. My USC Trojans, for one, really and truly should not be in this discussion at all, and it's frankly an embarrassment that they are. Yes, they'd probably win a playoff, but who cares? We don't have a playoff system, we have a system where you're judged on your body of work, and USC lost to Stanford and beat next to nobody. As for the others -- Georgia, Kansas, West Virginia, Missouri (!) -- they all, like USC, are nice teams, but none of them scream "national champion" and all have glaring flaws. So will the LSU-OSU winner, of course, particularly if it's the two-loss Tigers. But in this strangest of all seasons, sheer inertia should result in the Mythical Championship Game winner being recognized by both polls. If Hawaii had beaten Georgia, it would have been a different story, but of course, that rather emphatically did not happen. So tonight's game is for all the marbles: BCS and AP. That said, the phrase "undisputed champion" would not be proper. There's plenty of cause to dispute the result. It's just that no single alternative stands out, so tonight's winner gets the consensus title by default.

Go Buckeyes.

Comments

[Sandy Underpants]

There's no compelling national champion this season, just a 'who lost last wins' scenario. And in just a few minutes we'll see who has the last loss.

Go Bucks (blech!!!)

[yea]

usc would probably win a playoff? nice little throw-in there. georgia and lsu would be favored on neutral sites.

[Brendan Loy]

yea, are you serious? I go out of my way to say, unprovoked, that USC doesn't deserve to be in the title discussion, that I'm embarrassed to hear some in the media talking about them winning an AP title... and you criticize me for being a homer because of the one pro-USC thing I say in the entire post. Good grief.

As of the end of the regular season, I'd say that USC and Georgia would be co-favorites in a playoff.

[yea]

fair enough brendan, overall tone of your post wasn't usc, and i wasn't really trying to call you a homer or anything. i just glanced through the post and that part stuck out to me. i disagree with you and think both the teams i mentioned would be over 3 pt favorites.

i disagree with your premise about this being a mythical title game. we discussed this already but i think a bad champion doesnt mean no champion. everyone plays in the same shitty system and whatever result comes up comes up. unless the polls are split, the winner of this game is the champ.

I grew up in the Midwest living Big 10 Football and played (football) in the MAC.. but I've lived south of the Mason-Dixon for 8 years now and SEC speed is no myth. I'm not saying LSU will win, or even that LSU this year is faster than tOSU, only that year-in-year-out the SEC puts the fastest college teams on the field. The NFL has 130 starters from the SEC, the most from any conference. And the SEC leads conferences in the number of starters at starting quarterbacks, defensive linemen, cornerbacks and strong safeties and is tied for the highest number of starting running backs.

[kcatnd]

*Chris Wells 65-yard TD*

Some random Nebraska fan: FIRE BO PELINI.

[David K.]

Considering that Michigan beat a Florida team noone thought they could come CLOSE to beating and Wisconsin came close to beating Tennessee, and given the way the game is going now, i'm not sure the SEC would beat the Big Ten head to head.

[David K.]

Wow, that was a horrible penalty call. Late hit? Your kidding me right??

[BK]

And the tide has turned. Geaux Tigers!

[Marty West]

It's pretty much bullshit a 2 loss team gets to play for the National Championship....50 miles from their own campus.

[yea]

lsu was the only team that didnt play a high school schedule not to lose a game in regulation this year.

[David K.]

Yeah cause that Louisiana Tech game back in november was a REAL back breaker for the Tigers...

[yea]

david,

your comment refutes nothing i said. try again.

[David K.]

If you can't understand it yea, i'm not going to spell it out for you

Brendan is correct, this year has no valid champion, no one stands out over anyone else.

[Joe Mama]

Looks like this game is showing that the conventional wisdom is conventional for a reason.

[yea]

i understand exactly what you said, and it failed badly to prove whatever point you were trying to make. lsu is standing out pretty well right now and had a hell of a regular season in the nation's best conference.

i'd like to be the first to offer congrats to the champs and i'd like to be among the many to laugh at the big-10. hopefully the polsters will learn their lesson and never let another big-10 team in the title game again.

[yea]

im going to bed. if lsu blows this i might look a tad bad tomorrow.

[Dawgpound]

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA OHIO STATE CHOKES AGAIN O-9 against SEC TEAMS OHIO STATE SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!! MICHIGAN IS 6-1 against SEC teams in Bowl Games. YOU ARE THE SEC's
BEACH!!!!

[SaveFarris]

So Dave K, in your mind Virginia Tech is on the same level as Kent State?

[Sandy Underpants]

The most annoying crap about Ohio St. stinking up another BCS title game is that when all the real fans were miffed about them losing their way into the game, commentators like Kirk Dorkstreit (OSU Alumn) frames the question around whether LSU belongs in the game, assuming that of course OSU does since they just lost one game. Ohio St. was by far, no doubt, the worst (BCS) conference champion of all 6. LSU, USC, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Virginia Tech were head and shoulders above OSU. There has to be some standard of quality wins for these teams to land at #1 in a chaotic scenario such as the one presented this season. It's not just who you lose to, but who you beat.