Don’t Look Now: My Take on the BCS Title Game

Boy, oh boy is the media eating some crow today or what?  The one thing about all of this is I am tired of hearing about how the extended layoff may have hurt Ohio State.  Look at it this way, of the 10 teams that played in conference championship games only 3 won their bowl games: Florida, Southern Miss and Central Michigan. For the sake of this argument we need to remove Southern Miss and Ohio from the equation as they faced each other in a bowl game and both played in a conference championship game.So, really there is no advantage to having a shorter layoff for bowl games as the teams with the extra week or so off generally won their games.  Besides, I think it was OSU’s own Kirk Herbstreit who went on record saying that after two or three weeks it is really a moot point anyway as that is when teams start to lose their edge.  So, I don’t buy that argument at all.

On to the game.  Boy, did Troy Smith get knocked down a peg.   All we heard the last week or so was how he was this year’s ‘it’ player, this year’s Vince Young and he looked rather ordinary out there against Florida’s pass rush. There was some sentiment that Smith could be a darkhorse first round pick in April, but after last night’s game I don’t think that will happening.  To be blunt Smith almost looked as though he was a freshman QB being thrown to the wolves last night.  Ohio State clearly did not anticipate Florida’s elite defensive speed.   It almost seems as though once Ginn went out of the game Tressel did not know what to do next.

One begins to wonder whether Tressel watched any game film on the Gators or not.  They did not anticipate the Gators’ dominant pass rush at all and Smith looked lost at times out there.  Granted, not all of that was Smith’s fault as he rarely had enough time to drop back, set up, and throw a pass.  More times than not he was having to scramble before throwing or throw on the run.  But, it seemed as though the Buckeyes were caught off guard by what Florida was doing offensively and as the game went on I would almost swear that OSU’s game plan must have been to give Ted Ginn the  ball 15 times and when he got hurt Tressel had no clue what to do next.

On the flipside of that Chris Leak greatly improved his draft stock with last night’s outing.  He won’t be a top pick and I don’t know that he will ever be a franchise caliber QB but he could probably succeed as a game manager QB.  Someone who won’t win games for you but he won’t lose them either.  He showed great poise and leadership last night and stayed within himself and did not try to overdo things on the field.

I was very impressed with Florida defensive end Derrick Harvey as well.  He was an absolute terror and was in Troy Smith’s kitchen all night long.

One thing the BCS games this year show just how inexact a science rating the best college football teams really is. The two teams that the media championed as the two best all year long both got their heads handed to them in their bowl games. One really could not find anyone outside of the southeast who would debate the notion that Michigan and OSU were the two best teams this year. Heck, all of the Big Ten homers were calling the OSU/Michigan game the real national championship game and any bowl game was just going to be a matter of showing up to collect the hardware.

Another thing that we found out this past week is that the Big Ten elite are far behind the rest of the country’s elite when it comes to overall speed.  USC ran Michigan off the field in the second half of the Rose Bowl.  Michigan was able to bottle up USC’s running game, but their secondary could not keep up with the Trojan’s recievers.  Meanwhile Florida just ran OSU off the field last night.  Those in the media picking Florida to win did so because they maintained that Ohio State did not possess SEC speed and that they had not faced a team nearly as fast as Florida is this year.  I guess they were right on that account.