It's easy to criticize the quarterbacks and players on the field for the mess at Ohio State. But they didn't create it. They are just trying to clean it up.
View full sizeMichigan State linebacker Denicos Allen (top center) celebrates with his teammates after one of the nine sacks of Ohio State quarterbacks Joe Bauserman (14) and Braxton Miller on Saturday.COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The sky looked like the bruise the Ohio State football team absorbed Saturday from Michigan State.
A television camera whistled like a zip line rider above the wreckage on the field, giving the audience a bird's-eye view of a landscape of loss. Joe Bauserman, the deposed quarterback, in relief of Braxton Miller, the quarterback presumptive of tomorrow, drove the Buckeyes to the last-minute, half-loaf score that is better than none.
It was cold and misty at the Horseshoe, as Ohio State lost to the Spartans, 10-7, in a game that was close only because Michigan State's mistakes made it that way. The camera and the weather, if not the quality of play, seemed out of November games in seasons past.
That was when the Buckeyes were winning or sharing six straight Big Ten championships. That was when BCS games against the other members of the cabal that runs college football were considered a birthright here. That is a memory now, one that is almost certainly not going to be freshened this season.
Miller, said Luke Fickell, the coach hauled into the spotlight to manage this mess, is still the starting quarterback. Then again, Fickell also said he was going to open up the competition. "Rattled" might be the term for Fickell's view at the moment.
They say if you have two quarterbacks, you really have none. But when the quarterback who was the franchise for the last three seasons, Terrelle Pryor, is commenting about the game on Twitter from Oakland as a suspended member of the Raiders, that's when you really, most sincerely, have nothing.
Except maybe regrets.
If Fickell turns the game over to Miller or Bauserman, what are they going to do with it? It is easy to criticize the unready (Miller) and the unable (Bauserman), but no one expected Miller to be starting this soon and no one expected Bauserman to do anything but mop up as a fifth-year senior and career backup. They can do better than this and the bookend nightmare in Miami two weeks ago, of course.
So can the coaches, who seem to have no screen pass in their playbook against a ferocious pass rush such as Michigan State showed and whose routes for young receivers seem to consist of 18-yard, slow-developing patterns.
Ohio State wants to run, an imperative in the cold and wind with an inexperienced quarterback like Miller. But feeding smallish Jordan Hall against an opponent with nine defenders in the box was as self-defeating as it was revelatory of the utter lack of creativity on the staff the defensive-minded Fickell inherited.
It says here that Miller can play. Everything he showed in the frost at Canton's Fawcett Stadium for Huber Heights Wayne in the big-school championship game against St. Edward last December did not melt away like snowflakes on your tongue. But he is not the same athlete as the NFL defector and scandal trigger, Pryor. Few are.
Shambles on the field were Pryor's meat and potatoes. Everything would be broken, all plans in flames, and there he would go, reversing field at Iowa and gaining 14 yards on fourth-and-10 in the fourth quarter, throwing it up for Jake Ballard to go and get in the Rose Bowl on third-and-long, gold spun from soiled straw.
Pryor, along with Jim Tressel, the coach who coddled him and covered up his transgressions and those of his teammates, should take the blame for the state of Buckeyes football now. Not Fickell, not Miller or Bauserman, and not the confused offensive line that gave up nine sacks to the Spartans.
Tressel escapes his portion of the blame to many people, what with high school coaches saluting him on the opening weekend of games and Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio, Tressel's former OSU aide, holding him in such reverence that the only way the Spartans might have lost was if Fickell had worn a sweater vest on the sideline.
Fans have no problem heaping all the scorn they can summon up on Pryor, though. Pryor spent the afternoon and evening tweeting about the game, drawing down criticism from fans who made it clear that, as one tweeted, "You're not one of us."
In a tweet Pryor later took down, he said, "I know I made mistakes. Never heard of one that didn't but one. But I'm always going to be a Buckeye. Like it or not."
The messianic biblical reference should be clear. And he made it just in time for the return next week at Nebraska of the four suspended players who didn't flee to the NFL (DeVier Posey, Dan Herron, Mike Adams and Solomon Thomas).
Fans will look at them as saviors. They deserve a second chance. But this season at Ohio State has devolved into one of salvage, not salvation.
On Twitter: @LivyPD
Source: http://www.cleveland.com/livingston/index.ssf/2011/10/michigan_state_deals_reeling_o.html
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