Ohio State...Why Be Jealous?

To those who will be jealous just because Ohio State is beautiful, There are three words to keep in mind.

Get over it.

Don't like that, here's five more.

You ain't seen nothin' yet.

If Coach Jim Tressel's tenure at The Ohio State University is anything like his tenure at Youngstown State, then he is just warming up. Even if the Buckeyes win on January 7 and have a mass exodus of juniors, they will still be loaded for next season. Surely they will be considered a top 5 team to start 2008.

Tressel actually got off to a faster start at tOSU, winning the BCS National Championship in just his second year. That win validated a theory about former tOSU head coach John Cooper: he recruited great athletes and didn't know what to do with them once he got them to Columbus. Tressel knew how to use the talent he inherited and led them to an improbable win over the University of Miami.

We'll see what Les Miles has to bring with Louisiana State. It should be a formidable challenge for Tressel, perhaps the biggest of his coaching career after the pasting tOSU received at the hands of the University of Florida just one year ago.

The irony is that Tressel has a pretty similar track record at tOSU as he had at YSU. He won the first time he had a team in the D-IAA National Championship at YSU and lost the second time.

After the loss he proceeded to qualify for and win two National Championships in succession to win three in a four year span.

Overall, he would win four titles total at YSU in six games and qualified for the playoffs in 10 out of 15 seasons. All four of his D-IAA titles came in a nine-year span.

Impressive, indeed.

Tressel has been at tOSU now for seven seasons. This is his third BCS title game appearance.

There is no reason to believe that he couldn't duplicate his Youngstown success in Columbus as well. He is rarely without a well-stocked and well-balanced roster of players and he addresses his needs from a recruiting standpoint very systematically. In other words, it isn't just about accumulating "talent" for Tressel; it's about getting the right talent.

If you must be jealous of anything outside of the Buckeye Nation, it is that Tressel has poured his heart and soul into tOSU at a time when coaches are mercenaries, looking, perhaps mistakenly, at their "next challenge".

For Tressel, his coaching values are very much the same as his father, the late Dr. Lee Tressel. He never aspired to a much higher level than his father had attained at Baldwin-Wallace. However, he was destined to go farther and he had enough recognition of his own talent as a coach to understand that he was capable of much greater things.

That is what the rest of the college football world is up against. Coach Jim Tressel may not run an immaculate program, which is hard to do in this day and age. But he does come close and he already has an impressive set of credentials that other college football "nations" would be well advised to emulate and not be jealous of.

The Hypeman Trophy...Not The Real CollegeFootball MVP

The Hypeman, er, Heisman Trophy winner will be announced this Saturday night. Can somebody wake me up when it is over?

Let me tell you something...there is nothing that will ever convince me that the Hypeman will ever be a legitimate award ever again until the selection committee starts putting players on both sides of the ball and from all positions on the field into contention to win the award.

I remember when Chris Spielman, the Ohio State linebacker who would go on to have a distinguished career with the Detroit Lions and Buffalo Bills, was a senior. All the hype that year, 1986, was about Oklahoma linebacker Brian Bosworth and how Bosworth was going to be All-World. He would cure world hunger, this and that, on and on, ad nauseam. The Boz could do no wrong.

Bosworth, as I remember, was a finalist for the Hypeman. Go figure. Even if he didn't win the “award.”

The reality was that Spielman had more tackles and sacks that season than Bosworth. The Cleveland Plain Dealer published a small but very telling blurb on the comparative stats of the two linebackers just before the Hypeman vote in 1986. Perhaps he should have been in the Hypeman loop, but Spielman wasn’t even on the radar screen.

Spielman may not have had a Hall Of Fame caliber pro career, but he was pretty good by any objective analysis.

Bosworth chunked out of the NFL within three years of his overrated career. He was a Grade A self-promoter and a failure at backing up his own hype if there ever was one.

That was the first time that I felt a non-skill position player should have won the award. Never mind that I thought it should have been Spielman instead, but I digress.

Since then, only one player who hasn't been a QB, WR or RB has won the Hypeman. Go figure that it was Charles Woodson from That School Up North, even though he's gone on to have just as serviceable a pro career as Spielman.

There should have been other non-QBs, WRs, and RBs in the last 20 years that should have rated higher. Orlando Pace should have won the "award" the year before Woodson. I guess being an offensive lineman ain't sexy enough for the Hypeman. That's only one example, but there have been others over the last twenty.

And that is why I say Ohio State’s LB James Laurinaitis deserved consideration this year as opposed to the usual skill position suspects. I’m not saying that the finalists for this year’s “award” aren’t good players or won’t go on to have productive NFL careers. But are they decidedly better than Laurinaitis? That is very debatable?

Don't like Laurinaitis? Why not LSU ‘s DT Glenn Dorsey? Why not That School Up North’s T Jake Long? USC’s T Sam Baker? Illinois’ LB J Leman? I could go on and on...but I'm sure you are all smart enough to get the point.