Another Historic Game at The Shoe
As a surprise treat last weekend, I took my family to Yogurtville. You get to fix your own frozen yogurt with toppings all at a set price per ounce. It was great, my kids had a field day. After sampling all the flavors of yogurt, I went with my mainstay, vanilla. I added minimal amounts of toppings, cause I like the vanilla yogurt. My oldest daughter on the other hand, went the chocolate route and proceeded to put just about every topping possible.
I like vanilla as my yogurt flavor, not my football teams offensive scheme! The play calling was so predictable, even the announcers were telling you what OSU was going to do on each play. This appears to be the sad trend in OSU offense and we really have no one to blame except Tressel. Oh yeah, we finally threw it to the tight ends (which made me drop my drink since I haven't seen that since Cooper days) and we had an option pitch to the running backs and some run to the first down markers and stop passes, and it was all so predictable. The O line was supposed to be revamped, but the Navy undersized Dline was pushing them around. We should have been able to run the ball all day and we looked really bad up the middle. If this is what we should expect the rest of the year (and based on past experience it is), we won't be in the top 25 by the end of the season. I hate to say it, but Tressel's downfall may be his uncompromising loyalty to his staff. Bollman has proven time and time again that he isn't a decent Oline coach or asst coach to boot. If Tressel keeps this up, he'll be coaching somewhere else next year. We desperately need to add some toppings to this vanilla or they'll be some serious beat downs on us this year.
As alluded to earlier this year (see spring ball posting), our Dbacks couldn't cover anyone. We are in for a lot of trouble the rest of the year if this is the case. Again our Dline couldn't move the Navy Oline (with the exception of Gibson who looks like a beast). The linebackers were average at best in this game as well. In a nutshell, our defense is in rebuilding mode (not reloading).
Finally, Terrelle Pryor didn't impress me as being much better than he was at the end of last year. He was flat out outplayed by the Navy QB who had less to work with then Pryor did. The only noticeable improvement was that he looked to pass first then run.
This upcoming week will define our season and I'mafraid we are up for an historic home loss, the worse in OSU history. I can just see Pete Carrolls prep for the week, it'll go something like this:
"On offense, we need to double team Gibson. Uhh.. that should do it."
"On defense, we need to place a middle linebacker as spy on Pryor. Oh and on third and long we'll need to double team Sanzenbacher."
Folks, it'll be that simple for USC. You look at every category and they have someone in the top 5 except for QB. USC doesn't need Barkley to do a thing cause they'll be able to run it down our throat the whole game. Their whole Oline is back and so is our Dline and we know what happened last year! To boot, we don't have the same LB's as last year or even a decent DB. This is going to be ugly.
On offense, this game will define Pryor's entire college career. The pressure is solely on him to perform for this game as he really is the only guy on the field (maybe Gibson) who can play with these guys. Based upon past performances, I don't think he'll be able to deliver. We have an unproven receiving corp (who apparently couldn't get open deep against Navy, cause I don't recall any long passes) and our backs seemed ineffective in running the ball. This is going to be ugly.
There is still a very tiny part of me that believes Tressel was holding back the true offense and it would be chocolate frozen yogurt with all the fixings just busting with pizazz. Unfortunately I've been burned on this too many times and know I have to eat the vanilla frozen yogurt and like it...
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