Spring ball is over in Columbus, but OSU football is a year-round sport, and there’s always something to report on with the program. We’ll get to the Buckeye news, which includes more prison time for a former quarterback, and a highly-ranked recruit de-committing after an OSU fan he met on a visit turned out to be a registered sex offender. Yes, the creepiness quotient was unusually high this week in Buckeye country.

But the big news in college football is the progress made by the powers that be toward a playoff system to determine the sport’s national champion. The conference commissioners gathered in south Florida the last week of April and whittled down a number of proposals to a handful that will be further tweaked and presented to the schools for consideration sometime in June.

One thing is certain. The BCS is dead...by popular demand. A new playoff system, almost certainly one involving just four teams, will take effect for the 2014 season. How those four teams will be selected, and where they’ll play the games are the key details still to be worked out, but at the very least, now the two teams meeting for the title will have to qualify on a football field against a quality opponent, instead of strictly in the polls. And that is a big step in the direction long demanded by the fans of the sport. Whether it turns out to be an improvement over the current setup is another matter.

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Ohio State held their annual spring game Saturday, a combination football exhibition and recruiting showcase, as Braxton Miller and freshman receiver Mike Thomas grabbed the headlines on the field, and another blue-chip recruit succumbed to the allure of playing for Urban Meyer’s Buckeyes. Meyer was a visible presence all afternoon, staying close enough to the action to take a shotgun snap from center after firing up his troops with a one-on-one drill at midfield before the game.

Both teams came out throwing the ball, as Meyer had promised they would, and Miller’s Scarlet squad came out on top 20-14 with the help of Thomas’ 12 receptions for 131 yards. It didn’t escape notice after the game that OSU’s leading receiver had 14 receptions for the entire 2011 season. Meyer said last week that total was more like a game’s worth, and he set out to prove it Saturday.

Miller and backup Kenny Guiton combined for 57 pass attempts, against just 36 combined rushes. Miller and the Scarlet got 15 first downs passing, and only three running the ball, as Buckeye fans got their first look at Meyer’s no-huddle spread attack. Both quarterbacks established the pass to the perimeter early, opening up the short inside throws and seam passes to the tight ends.

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If you polled Buckeye players asking for the word to best describe spring football under Urban Meyer, the winning entry would probably be “intensity”. That’s the tone set by the coaches. That describes the pace of the practices. That’s the driving force behind turning everything they do - right down to their stretching - into a competition under Meyer. As senior fullback Zach Boren predicted at the outset of spring ball, “There is no on-off switch. Everyone will be going full-go, every play”.  And that’s exactly the way it has gone so far.

One thing the first-year Ohio State coach has made abundantly clear is that he will demand the same single-minded will to win in his players that he brings to the job himself. Speaking of identifying team leaders, Meyer had this to say: "We're looking for leadership by doing, by work ethic, by leading. I'm not interested in a bunch of group hugs or team meetings. I really want to see guys lead by not losing. You want to be a great leader, then go win."

It will be five months before he can begin erasing the bad memories from a disastrous season, but for now Meyer can be contrasted with his predecessor by how fast everything moves with him in charge.

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This year, I decided, was as good as any to skip the whole thing.  I didn’t fill out a bracket, which meant I wasn’t obsessing over things that mid-major powerhouses did well enough to scoot past a high-major with a mediocre basketball resume.  I wasn’t beating myself up over the conundrum of, “I want so and so to win, but I have blah-blah-blah in my bracket.”  For the most part, I did not have much concern for who was still standing on the final Saturday of March.

None of this is being written to say that I’m not a fan; nothing could be farther from the truth.  In most years, I’m glued to the tube for the conference tournaments, trying to determine the best back court that no one knows about, looking for a team that scratches and claws for every rebound, and identifying any potential Cinderella team that might just have a chance to stand on their own two feet after the opening weekend.  I have a system, and like the Blackjack player with big Vegas dreams, it’s usually a system with flaws.  This year, there would be no system; there would be no bracket.

Of course, I still wanted to weigh in with an opinion of some sort.  There were some things that I just really wanted to see happen, so I just floated some things out there.  Any take I had was almost immediately met with a question about my bracket, my Final Four, or who I thought would win it all.  Since I didn’t fill out a bracket, or even look at one, it was impossible to slate teams in a Final Four because I didn’t know who was in what region.  Picking Kentucky to win it all was a little bit easier because I don’t think anyone can beat them in a game that matters, regardless of what their path to and through New Orleans might have been.

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