If you somehow missed it, yesterday we did a bit of exclusive and original reporting, obtaining Ohio State documents showing that former Buckeye All-American Kirk Barton and notorious message board poster NevadaBuck are banned by Ohio State football for stealing practice footage from the Woody.
It’s been pretty cool to see the story blow up on most major outlets all across the country (except for the Ohio State beat, which has largely ignored it – as if “Proof That a Former All-American is Banned For Stealing Practice Film” isn’t absolutely newsworthy), but I think the best thing in my mind is that it kinda highlights how #journalism works.
The fact is, we really didn’t do anything special here. We just politely asked for a publically-available document and shared it with other people. That’s pretty much it. Anybody could have done this at any time. The only real hangup was waiting for the Ohio State public records office to actually fulfill our request, which took several months.
And the best part about doing it this way is that it’s pretty impossible to deny. It’s one thing to dismiss message board rumors as lies, it’s another to stare down an internal university document outlining accusations against you.
You can try to say that it’s “total fiction” all you want. But that claim implies that Ohio State is lying about the reason it banned you from the facilities and requires everyone to blindly believe your word over theirs. It also means that your real beef isn’t with us, it’s with the football program your site claims to have inside access to. Because that program is the one making the claim – not us.
So, best of luck with all of that, I guess.
- ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER
If you’ve spent even a collection of several seconds on this website or board, you’ve probably gathered that Ohio State special teams coordinator Parker Fleming is not a particularly popular man around these parts.
The reasons are… glaringly obvious.
From Bill Landis of Dotting the Eyes:
If you look at some of the efficiency ratings, Ohio State is right where it wants to be on offense and defense. In the FEI ratings, the Buckeyes are No. 1 on offense and No. 12 on defense in opponent-adjusted efficiency. Then you get to special teams, where they’re No. 96 in the country. If you look elsewhere, the Buckeyes are No. 1 on offense and No. 8 on defense in SP+, but No. 93 on special teams.
That’s not good enough for a program that claims to emphasize special teams as much as Ohio State does, especially one that employs a full-time special teams coordinator as one of its 10 permissible on-field assistant coaches, as OSU does with Parker Fleming.
…
Ohio State is too good in the other areas to have special teams be a potential vulnerability.
Here’s the thing, it’s one thing to struggle on special teams, it’s another to waste one of your 10 on-field assistant coach positions with a full-time special teams coordinator only to have him shit out the worst special teams unit the program has seen in probably over two decades.
You’ve got guys not knowing they can’t just jump over a wedge, you’ve got punt returners lined up nowhere near where punts are actually landing, and it’s proven shockingly difficult to find a kickoff returner who can simply catch the ball with regularity.
This is the sort of thing that’s going to get overlooked by most people until something catastrophic happens in a game that actually matters. At that point, it will be too late.
- THAT ELUSIVE QUARTERBACK TRIPLE CROWN
Heading into the season, I would have said that I’d be ecstatic if C.J. Stroud simply outplayed Bryce Young to become the clear QB1 in the country and the draft class.
I think we’re past that point. At the midway mark in the regular season, my hopes have switched – I now want him to cement himself as the single most dominant quarterback in college football history. And the thing is, he’s doing all the right things to put himself in that conversation.
From Nathan Baird of Cleveland.com:
If he continues at this pace, Stroud could enter rare company of those who have led all Football Bowl Subdivision teams in three important barometers of quarterback play.
• Stroud leads the nation in quarterback efficiency rating at 207.57. (That’s over 20 points higher than his score last season, which was second in the nation to Coastal Carolina’s Grayson McCall.) Right now he has a cushion of over 13 points from his nearest competitor, TCU’s Max Duggan (194.36).
• Stroud’s 10.9 yards per attempt also lead the nation, by more than half a yard over Duggan (10.3). He ranks 15th in the nation in passing yards per game despite ranking 79th in attempts per game.
• Stroud’s 24 touchdown passes lead the nation by two over Mississippi State’s Will Rogers, who has attempted 122 more passes.
That puts Stroud on pace for a quarterback triple crown that no one has achieved since Hawaii’s Colt Brennan in 2006. Boise State’s Bart Hendricks did it in 2000. No Power 5 quarterback has pulled off the trifecta since Heisman Trophy winner Danny Wuerffel of Florida in 1995.
Dude is putting up Air Raid numbers in a Pro Style offense where there are two reads and a checkdown in most progressions.
It’s almost incomprehensible how dominant he’s been, and it’s even more hilarious when you consider that he’s done it all despite losing the best receiver in college football during the first game of the season.
It’s honestly just a shame we’re going to have to wait all the way until December for the Heisman ceremony. It’s truly a waste of everyone’s time at this point.
- THIS IS WHY WE DON’T PLAY WITH HISTORY
Y’all wanna spend the rest of the day horrified? Because this is a thought exercise that will stick with you for quite a while.
Personally, I like the way things have turned out for my Local Team, and I’ve seen the movie The Butterfly Effect far too many times (once) to have any desire to fuck with the past in any way at all.
Colton is right – this is absolutely horrifying to think about, and it honestly has very little to do with Fickell personally, because I do think he would have turned into a perfectly fine head coach eventually.
My bigger problem would have been the principle that eight or nine wins earn you a head coaching job at Ohio State, which is just unfathomable now. But the fact is, it would have been shockingly easy at the time to view those Tressel years as The Golden Era of Buckeye Football and concede that it was probably never going to get better than that.
Say what you will about Urban Meyer, but rattling off 24 straight wins, winning a natty in his third season, and then setting the standard that “anything but 15-0 is a disappointment” in 2015 is the reason why Ohio State is still so neurotic about winning today.
EAT ARBY’S. Inside a highly lucrative and ethically questionable essay-writing service… 15,000 Ukrainians decide to have a mass orgy if Russia deploys nuclear weapons… A woman was scammed by a “Russian Astronaut” who claimed he needed money to return to Earth… A black hole burped up a shredded star…