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.