College Football Week Review and Jim Tressel

Article on Tressel
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COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Jim Tressel, this is your life:
You sing "Carmen Ohio" with the band after glorious triumphs. You listen to the victory bell ring. You watch the field at the Horseshoe become a teeming sea of celebrating scarlet as fans pour from the stands after beating Iowa 27-24 in overtime to win a Big Ten title.
And when you walk into the postgame news conference in your trademark vest and tie, the personification of Midwestern primness, you are greeted with a bouquet of roses.
You are Rose Bowl-bound. You have done it again -- clinching a fifth straight BCS bowl bid, your seventh in nine years at Ohio State. You will demolish Michigan next Saturday, extending a record winning streak over your hated rival to six. You are a relentless, perennial, inevitable winner.
You might be the most conservative coach in America, but you don't care. You obsessively play not to lose, instead of playing to win, but you don't apologize. You often allow less-talented teams to stay in games -- like the gutty Hawkeyes -- because of your buttoned-down dogma, but that's who you are.
You don't worry about your three-game bowl losing streak, or your recent futility against ranked nonconference opponents, or the fact that being the best team in the Big Ten means being a cut below the best teams in the nation these days. You don't listen to the people who squawk about the squandering of quarterback Terrelle Pryor's talents, or the people who howl at your affinity for punts, or the people who wonder what unholy circumstance would force you to ever take a certifiable football gamble.
You shrug when critics wonder why your team is 10th in the Big Ten in passing offense, attempting the fewest passes per game of any team in the league. You prefer the stats that show your team at the top of the league in rushing defense, total defense and turnover margin.
You point to your record -- now 92-21 at Ohio State -- and let it speak for itself.
Your 92nd victory was TresselBall in a microcosm. All that was good about it. All that was bad.
Your team pounded between the tackles for 229 rushing yards. Your team did not commit a turnover, while forcing three. Your defense made the last stop, when it had to. And your kicker made the last kick, when he had to.
But this is TresselBall, too:
Your team blew a two-touchdown lead in the fourth quarter in part by crawling even deeper into your familiar offensive shell. You were conservative in coming from ahead at home against USC, too, but this took it to another level.
The longest of your team's three passes in the final quarter went for 3 yards. Your final three offensive possessions of the game featured 12 runs and two passes, gaining a total of 31 yards and resulting in three points.
You recruited the No. 1 quarterback in the country two years ago, a player of lavish physical gifts. Yet here at the end of his 21st career start, with the Big Ten title on the line, you trusted the sandlot sophomore about as much as you'd trust a felon to be your house sitter.
You sat on the ball in the middle of the fourth quarter with great field position, starting on Iowa's side of the 50. You ran up the middle six straight times and left your backup kicker with a 47-yard field goal try to clinch the game. He missed. And then Iowa drove 70 amazing yards to tie the game with 2:42 left.
You got the ball back with plenty of time to go for the win. But from the moment you gave Pryor his most urgent instruction ("Don't turn the ball over") it was obvious that going for the win was hardly the first priority.
You took 1:38 to run five tentative plays, then punted it back to the Hawkeyes. You ignored the boos emanating from the 105,455 fans in Ohio Stadium, because you adhered to the TresselBall dogma: you avoided mistakes.
Your conservatism was rewarded when Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz responded in kind, running out the clock and playing for overtime. This suddenly seemed like the famous 10-10 tie between Michigan State and Notre Dame -- a game played in 1966, when the hurry-up offense was far from its current modern science and the passing game was rudimentary.
You and Ferentz are kindred spirits. Good coaches. Successful coaches. Yet your combined management of the end of this game is why the rest of the nation rolls its eyes at the bland Big Ten.
But do you care? No. You don't care. Because here in this tunnel-visioned, tradition-addicted conference, going to the Rose Bowl is just about as joyful a result as playing for the national title.
And you don't care because even after the fans voiced their dismay, hyper-conservatism triumphed in the end. Your painful-to-watch pragmatism was rewarded. The Vest knew best.
Your tight end, Jake Ballard, said this: "Tressel's way usually works out. He's our leader and we'll follow him everywhere."
To Pasadena now. But not after some tension Saturday night.
You should have heard the guy walking out of the stadium when it was over, shouting repeatedly, "Jim Tressel is a genius!" Twenty minutes earlier, when the lead had been squandered and overtime was upon us, he might well have been shouting, "Jim Tressel is an idiot!" But not at the end.
You were a genius at the end because your backup kicker had a fantasy moment. Devin Barclay, a 26-year-old former Major League Soccer player who just became your No. 1 kicker two weeks ago after an injury to Aaron Pettrey, won the game with a 39-yard field goal in overtime. Then Barclay lost his mind.
"I just took off running," said Barclay, who accidentally mimicked a soccer-goal celebration by sprinting away from his onrushing teammates. "I don't really know where I was going, or what my plan was. Apparently I took my helmet off."
In the postgame scrum, someone ripped Barclay's name off the back of his jersey. It is the souvenir of the night in Columbus.
You cherish the kicking game, so you loved seeing it come down to a successful field goal. It helped you forget that 99-yard kickoff return your coverage unit surrendered. That play will have you rewinding the videotape over and over Sunday.
But Saturday was for celebration -- and nobody knows how to celebrate like you, Jimmy T. When last we saw you, your wife was driving a very sensible, pragmatic Toyota Venza underneath the Ohio Stadium stands. You were sitting in the passenger seat, placidly eating a sandwich.
Surely, there was a glass of milk waiting for you when you got home.


Gameday Final
Having seen No. 3 Texas and No. 4 TCU win in similar fashion 90 miles apart on Saturday, duty demands that I provide my assessment of the two teams.
I can say without hesitation that the Longhorns could stay on the field with the Horned Frogs.
How would TCU match up with Texas this season?
Relax, Orangebloods, just having a little fun with you, although Mountain West Conference teams are 2-0 in BCS bowl games.
History, of course, dictates that the teams be viewed through the other end of the lens. The University of Texas first played TCU in 1897, Texas winning 18-10 in Waco, and the Horned Frogs have been chasing the Longhorns ever since.
They haven't caught them very often. TCU held sway in the 1930s, winning four straight, and took five of seven from 1955 to 1961. The last one, a 6-0 upset of the No. 1 Horns on the next-to-last weekend, was when Texas coach Darrell Royal uttered his immortal description of TCU.
"They're like a bunch of cockroaches," Royal said. "It's not what they eat and tote off, it's what they fall into and mess up that hurts."
When the Southwest Conference dissolved in 1995, Texas led the series 61-20-1. Texas added a 34-13 victory in 2007, in case anyone had any questions. Yet the Horned Frogs are back, cockroachy as ever.
No. 3 Texas races out to a 40-0 halftime lead at Baylor and cruises to a 47-14 victory. No. 4 TCU blows through No. 16 Utah, goes up 38-14 at the half and cruises to a 55-28 decision.
Texas is big and fast and playing with a vibe that went missing during the first half of the season.
"We're relaxed and playing and having fun," Longhorns coach Mack Brown said after Saturday's game. "'Let's see how good we really are.' They are playing that way."
TCU is fast, not quite as big as Texas and playing better than any team from a non-automatic qualifying conference ever has. The Horned Frogs made more mistakes Saturday than did the Longhorns, but they played a tougher opponent. The comparisons are fun to make, but in the end, the BCS formula will spit out two teams and the other BCS bowls will make business decisions.
"It doesn't do much good this time of year to complain," TCU coach Gary Patterson said. "Most people don't like complainers."
With Texas and TCU undefeated and Houston disappointed to be 8-2, it's been fun to say that the best conference in the nation this season is the Southwest Conference. Of course, the Longhorns play in the Big 12, the Horned Frogs in the Mountain West and the Cougars in Conference USA. The Southwest Conference expired for a reason.
Saturday illustrated why it died.
Baylor was taken into the Big 12 in part because the governor of Texas at the time, Ann Richards, graduated from there. The Bears have won 14 conference games in 14 conference seasons. About two of every five spectators at Floyd Casey Stadium in Waco on Saturday wore burnt orange. It's a longer-lasting color. By the fourth quarter, the yellow and green pretty much had disappeared from the stands.
TCU has flourished since the end of the SWC. The Horned Frogs hired a winning coach, Dennis Franchione, and when he left for Alabama in 2001, TCU had the smarts to promote Patterson, the defensive coordinator.
He has built a formidable program. The Horned Frogs have several players who could slip into Texas' lineup undetected. They also have several who couldn't. That would be the fun of a Texas-TCU bowl game. It would take some upsets along the way.
"It would be a great opportunity," TCU linebacker Tank Carder said.

CINCINNATI -- Mardy Gilyard is fast on the football field, and his mouth moves with comparable speed off it. When asked to compare his Cincinnati Bearcats to the Ohio State Buckeyes 100 miles up I-71, the wide receiver was ready.
"They can chill up there and run the ball all day in the Big Ten," Gilyard said Friday night after UC beat West Virginia 24-21. "We'll be down here gunslingin', throwing the football and having fun and winning games."
Any doubt in your mind which is the No. 1 team in Ohio, Mardy?
"Never been no doubt," he said. "We aren't the little brother no more. We're the scrappy little cousin, I guess."
They are not kissing cousins these days. The previously moot debate about the pre-eminent football program is now sizzling across the Buckeye State. Or the bUCkeye state, if you ask Bearcats fans.
For just about the first time ever, football pauper Cincinnati has the upper hand on lordly Ohio State. Throughout the decades the Buckeyes have accumulated national championships and Heisman trophies and a vast army of fans, while the Bearcats have accumulated a lot of funky uniform combinations. But this year, Cincinnati is ranked higher in the BCS standings (No. 5 for UC to OSU's No. 11) and in every poll. It is undefeated and on the fringe of the national title hunt, while Ohio State has lost twice and long ago excused itself from that race.
In a city that almost amounts to a separate island state on the southern border of Ohio, the Bearcats faithful are eating this up like a bowl of Skyline Chili.
The big AM radio station in Cincinnati is WLW 700, and it has been peppering Ohio State fans with trash-talking promos all season. (They can be heard here.) Buckeye Nation, which tends to take itself rather seriously, has responded with a barrage of disdain aimed at reminding Cincinnati of its place in the historical pecking order.
The best thing about this nonrivalry rivalry is the stylistic differences between the two programs and the two universities.
Cincinnati is an urban commuter school in the remodeled Big East. Ohio State is a state university -- THE state university, its graduates haughtily point out -- in the old-money Big Ten.
Cincinnati is flashy and trendy, throwing the ball 34 times per game and ranking seventh nationally in passing offense. Ohio State is button-down and old-school, ranking 102nd in passing yards but fifth in total defense.
Cincinnati is led by the glib, daring Brian Kelly, who is wont to wear all black on the sideline. Ohio State is led by the staid, cautious Jim Tressel, who would sooner open a game with an onside kick than wear all black.
Cincinnati's most exciting player is Gilyard, who wears shells in his braided hair -- a look that probably wouldn't fly at Ohio State. The Buckeyes' most exciting player is quarterback Terrelle Pryor, who is kept on a leash of Tresselian shortness.
Cincinnati is tickled to be selling out "The Nip," its 34,000-seat stadium. Ohio State has long been accustomed to selling out "The Shoe," its 105,000-seat monolith.
Cincinnati fans tailgate in parking garages, because that's the only available space. Ohio State fans tailgate near the banks of the Olentangy River, which flows picturesquely outside Ohio Stadium.
The best way to settle their differences is on the field, and Gilyard would be fine with that.
"We want to play them guys," he said.
It won't happen this year. But that won't stop everyone here from talking about it.

Three Weekend Observations
By Ivan Maisel, ESPN.com
1. USC played six of its first nine games on the road, and Trojans fans used that as an explanation for the team's sputtering performances the past few weeks. Coach Pete Carroll's Songs of the Week: "Mama, I'm Coming Home" by Ozzy Osbourne and "Homeward Bound" by Simon & Garfunkel. USC responded by giving up the most points in its history and losing 55-21 to Stanford. Another definition of home: where they have to take you in when you have nowhere else to go.

2. Fiesta Bowl honchos John Junker and Alan Young came away as impressed with TCU off the field Saturday night as on it. Bowls want fans who will travel. "We came here to get a feel for a level of excitement," Junker said after seeing 50,307 fill Amon Carter Stadium, breaking a 25-year-old attendance record by some 3,000. "It was a great atmosphere. That's something we can feel."

3. Stanford may be the hottest team in the Pac-10, but the Cardinal, despite holding sole possession of second place in the league at 6-2, have the longest road to the Rose Bowl of the top four teams. Arizona, despite its loss to Cal on Saturday night, can get its first trip to Pasadena in 32 conference seasons by winning out. That would mean the Wildcats would have beaten the other possible two-loss teams (Oregon, Stanford, Oregon State).