After a season in which events on the field were consistently overshadowed by events off of it, one would hope that college football would pull its collective self together at the end and give us some premier bowl matchups to savor.

Won’t happen. College football’s season of strife ends in January with all the impact of the new phone book, giving us maybe the sorriest series set of major bowls since the BCS scheme was hatched back in ’98. Virginia Tech-Michigan would be an interesting second-tier matchup, but it’s a weak excuse for a Sugar Bowl. Clemson-West Virginia seems more like a mid-90’s Carquest Bowl than the 2011 Orange Bowl. Oklahoma State-Stanford is a fun but a meaningless exhibition with the teams out of national-title consideration.

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College football is like your favorite movie -- it can be the most entertaining thing in the world no matter how frequently you watch it. The only difference -- instead of it concluding with that perfect plot twist you love so much, the movie abruptly ends in a scene where your parents passionately make out with excessive tongue.

Or at least, that’s what the BCS feels like to me -- more so this year than any other -- after the announcement that LSU and Alabama would be playing in the BCS National Championship game this January.

I realize there are a lot of factors that led to this outcome -- that being a rematch of a game played just four weeks ago to determine which team is the best in college football. What I’m trying to get at is that none of those factors make a lick of sense to anyone living outside of Alabama or SEC wonderland.

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Jared Sullinger had to sit out of the game against Texas Pan-American, suffering back spasms after Ohio State’s rout of Duke on Tuesday night. The No. 2 Ohio State Buckeyes (8-0) didn’t need him, beating the Broncos handedly 64-35 Saturday afternoon.

Deshaun Thomas and Evan Ravenel both scored 11 points, the only Ohio State players who reached double digits in a sluggishly paced game that featured zero fast-break points from either team. The Broncos might be the worst team on Ohio State’s schedule this year, but the offense struggled without Sullinger as the Buckeyes shot just 39% from the field.

“We came out with great energy on the defensive end, but for some reason we weren't able to put the ball in the basket when we wanted to,” Ohio State coach Thad Matta said. “We missed three point-blank lay-ups, and it catapulted itself into poor game shooting.”

Almost everyone struggled to put the ball in the basket against Texas Pan-Am. Leading scorer Deshaun Thomas was just 5-13 on field goal attempts after his big performance against Duke as the starters combined to hit just 36% of their shots. Even William Buford, Ohio State’s second leading scorer, had his worst game of the season -- scoring just three points on 1-7 shooting.

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All year we’ve been waiting for the NCAA Hammer to fall on Ohio State, and very soon it will.  A one-year postseason ban taking effect for 2012 is probably the worst-case scenario, and for an OSU athletic department on a roll with the hiring of Urban Meyer, and a top-ranked basketball program, the Hammer is starting to look more like a speed bump. It’s springtime come early in Columbus.

President Gordon Gee and A.D. Gene Smith have been dancing with the NCAA for months, and at times have not looked very nimble doing it, but it appears now that the OSU program will get no more than a one-year ban, if that...and possibly some additional scholarship losses on top of the five (over three years) that they’ve self-imposed, plus multiple years of probation, etc.

If that sounds like a light sentence given all the nefarious conduct in Columbus, consider it alongside the punishment already meted out...the 12-1 season wiped out, a star player jettisoned, multi-game suspensions for half a dozen players, and of course ridding college football of the menace that was Jim Tressel. Count me in the camp that thinks Ohio State has already paid dearly for their failure to report non-criminal rule-breaking by players.

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