Written by Jesse Lamovsky

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I know, I know… it’s Akron. There aren’t many teams in FBS football worse than the Zips, who went 1-11 last season and are staring down the barrel of a similar record this season. Lesser teams than Ohio State are going to dominate Akron in 2011, so there’s no sense in getting too excited about the 42-0 trouncing the Buckeyes handed the Zips on the season’s opening, infernally hot Saturday afternoon at the Horseshoe.

Still, it’s tough not to get excited about the way the Buckeyes played, never mind the opponent. Opening day is often sloppy in football, with unforced errors and mental mistakes marring otherwise easy victories. But in Luke Fickell’s first game as head coach his team was mid-season crisp, executing well on both sides of the ball. That they won is to be expected. But it wasn’t about just winning- it was about looking good doing it. And after all the turmoil of the summer, all the controversy, all the suspensions, Ohio State looked good.

Okay, Maybe He Isn’t THAT Bad: I’ve made no secret of my skepticism regarding Joe Bauserman’s level of talent, and my suspicion that he’s a MAC-level player wearing Scarlet & Gray- a suspicion which may very well be borne out before this season is over.

But when he performs well I’ll gladly give him credit. And Bauserman performed well in his starting debut Saturday. The 25-year old senior played sharp, mistake-free football throughout, completing 12-of-16 for 163 yards and three touchdowns- all to Jake Stoneburner- with no interceptions. He added 32 yards on six carries and scored the season’s first touchdown on a zigzagging 15-yard scramble off a broken play.

There’s plenty of uncertainty about how Bauserman will fare against the tougher opponents on Ohio State’s schedule, or even how much he’ll play with the development of Braxton Miller. But for now, he’s the man behind center.

Baby Braxton: For most fans the anticipating centered not around the starting debut of Joe Bauserman, but the college football debut of heralded freshman quarterback Braxton Miller, anointed in many circles as the successor to Terrelle Pryor before he even stepped on campus. Miller entered the game for the first time at the beginning of the second quarter (after much pleading by ESPN analysts Chris Spielman and Urban Meyer.) If you were looking for instant highlights, you were disappointed: a dropped pass and a poor snap waylaid Miller’s first series in three plays.

It got better. Miller re-entered the game with ten minutes to play in the third and Ohio State leading 28-0. After a first down and punt on his first series the freshman got the Buckeyes moving, taking his team 59 yards in six plays to a touchdown. Miller completed both of his passes on the drive, including the touchdown when he drilled a 14-yarder through traffic to fellow freshman Devin Smith. Two series later Miller got Ohio State into the end zone again. He opened the short drive with a 33-yard bomb to Evan Spencer, who made a dazzling one-handed grab at the Akron five. Rod Smith plowed in three plays later to provide the final margin of victory. Miller’s line for the day: 8-of-12 passing, 130 yards, one touchdown, no interceptions and thirty yards rushing on six carries. Not a shabby debut.

I think it’s obvious even at this early point that Braxton Miller is ahead of where Terrelle Pryor ever was as a natural passer. His footwork, pocket presence and the zip he puts on passes is far more reminiscent of Troy Smith. Athletically Miller isn’t in Pryor’s class, but if he performs as well as he looks throwing the football he won’t have to be. Spielman and Meyer made much of Miller’s seeming disengagement on the sideline- no headphones, no consultations with coaches- but honestly, we really don’t know what’s going on down there. All we can safely do is judge how Miller looked on the field- and he looked pretty damned good.

Reserves Rock: With Ohio State’s number-one running back (Jordan Hall) and receiver (DeVier Posey) suspended the backups had the opportunity to make some noise. For the most part they did just that. Carlos Hyde pounded out 93 yards on 19 carries while Rod Smith bounced back from a first-quarter fumble inside the Akron five to post 74 yards on 18 carries with a touchdown. Redshirt freshman Verlon Reed made three catches for 66 yards, true freshman Devin Smith added 52 on three grabs with a touchdown, massive (6’5”) redshirt freshman T.Y. Williams garnered 34 yards on two catches, while Evan Spencer’s one catch was as spectacular as you’ll ever see. True big plays were in short supply- the longest play was Spencer’s 33-yard grab- but the efficiency and execution were top-notch. Of course, again, it was Akron.

No “Stone” Hands Here: If Jake Stoneburner’s opening-day performance is any indicator, the tight end position won’t be a forgotten one this season as it often was under Jim Tressel. Stoneburner finished with a game-high four catches for fifty yards and was on the receiving end of all three of Joe Bauserman’s touchdown passes. Perhaps the best tight end prospect the program has had since Ricky Dudley- maybe since the great John Frank- Stoneburner is a matchup nightmare: too fast for linebackers, too big for defensive backs. If the Buckeyes continue to feature him in the passing game- and with the limited Bauserman and the inexperienced Miller behind center they likely will- he could be on the way to a huge season.

Crisp & Clean: For a season opener played in 95-degree weather with a rookie head coach, a first-time starting quarterback and eight starters out with suspensions, Ohio State’s overall execution was very good. The Buckeyes committed just three penalties on the day and turned the ball over once on Rod Smith’s first-quarter fumble. The last time they opened the season against Akron, in 2007, the Buckeyes committed five penalties and turned it over five times in an ugly 20-2 win.

Silver Bullets Flying: Maybe it was the influence of the youthful Fickell, or the influence of new defensive assistant Mike Vrabel, but the Buckeye defenders seemed more aggressive on Saturday than they have in recent years, when Jim Heacock was content to rush four men and drop the rest into zone coverages. (Not complaining- it’s a strategy that has largely worked and I'm not a big blitz advocate anyway.) Blitzing early, late and often, Ohio State sacked Akron quarterbacks five times and held the Zips to five first downs and a measly ninety total yards. In twelve total possessions Akron only crossed midfield once. The field-position edge also went decisively to the Buckeyes: the averaging starting field position for the Zips was their own 19-yard line, and five of their possessions started at or inside their fifteen.

Zippy Feeling Chippy: One man who wasn’t happy about Ohio State’s defensive aggressiveness was Akron head coach Rob Ianello, who is now 1-12 in his season-plus with the Zips. Ianello had some sharp words for Luke Fickell when they met at midfield after the game, chiding the new head coach for continuing to dial up blitzes long after the game had been decided.

Ianello’s anger is understandable. On the other hand, if you have a shutout going, I don’t see anything wrong with keeping your foot on the gas defensively to preserve it. Compare it to baseball: if a pitcher has a shutout going in the ninth inning he’s not going to simply groove fastballs, even if he’s up by ten runs. He’s going to keep bringing his best stuff in order to finish the whitewash, and no one will think anything of it.

Anyway, it wasn’t as if Fickell kept his starters on the field late in the fourth quarter. As a former high-school scout-teamer I’ve always been an advocate of letting the backups play to the fullest on the relatively rare occasions in which they get the chance. Those guys work just as hard as the starters and far more thanklessly: they deserve the opportunity to cut loose and have fun. It isn’t about embarrassing your opponent: it’s about rewarding players for hard, selfless work.

 

Around the Nation   

Game of the Week- Baylor/TCU: We’ve got four months to go in the 2011 college football season, and in those four months we might not see a wilder, crazier or  more dramatic game than Baylor’s 50-48 upset of TCU in Friday night’s opener on the Brazos. Played in the hundred-degree heat of Waco, this thriller featured 98 combined points, 1,030 combined yards, nine lead changes and two unbelievable comebacks in the fourth quarter alone.

What’s most astounding isn’t that the Bears won, snapping TCU’s 25-game regular-season winning streak. It’s that they had to win twice. Going into the fourth quarter Baylor led 47-23 behind five touchdown passes by Robert Griffin III. Then came the meltdown, a ten-minute blizzard of penalties, bad kick coverage and worse defense that enabled the Horned Frogs to score 25 unanswered points and take a 48-47 lead with 4:27 left. That devastating sequence should have been a gut-punch. Yet somehow Griffin, whose fumble set up the go-ahead field goal for TCU, led his team on an eleven-play, sixty-yard march culminating in an Aaron Jones field goal that gave Baylor the lead with 1:04 left and, ultimately, the win- again.

Win or lose, Gary Patterson had to be numbed by the performance of his defense. Ranked number-one in the nation in total defense the last three seasons, TCU was shredded for 564 yards, including six touchdown passes of 28 yards or more in the first three quarters. The fifty points Baylor scored was the most allowed by the Frogs in a non-overtime game since October 25, 2003 when Kevin Kolb and Houston racked up 55. Worst of all, Patterson’s proud defense couldn’t stop Baylor at the end, when one more stop would have preserved a quasi-miraculous comeback win.

But dwelling on the inadequacies of the TCU defense is unfair to Robert Griffin III and the show he put on Friday. RGIII was spectacular all night, completing 21-of-27 for 359 yards, five touchdowns and no interceptions. He even made a big fifteen-yard third-down catch in traffic to keep Baylor’s victory drive alive. Griffin had a bunch of opportunities to break out of the pocket and showcase his world-class speed in the open field, but he stayed with the plays, kept looking downfield and kept finding open receivers. Once upon a time RGIII was a track athlete playing quarterback. Now he’s a quarterback, period- and a terrific one.      

What a game. Once you get past the off-the-field BS, college football is a pretty good game, isn’t it?

Player of the Week: It can only be Robert Griffin III, who racked up 412 total yards passing, rushing and receiving and accounted for five touchdowns in Baylor’s thrilling victory. I don’t think RGIII will win the Heisman Trophy this season, because his team will lose too many football games. (My tentative pick is Trent Richardson of Alabama.) I do think Griffin might be most deserving, however.

It Only Prevents Victory: There were three-and-a-half minutes left and Utah State seemed well on the way to the biggest upset in school history, leading 38-28 at Auburn. Up to this point Aggie head coach Gary Anderson had called a near-perfect game: bold, imaginative and, most importantly, successful. His team was three-of-three on fourth down and had just converted a fake field goal to set up the touchdown that made it a ten-point game. Now the Aggies, who haven’t had a winning season since 1996, were on the verge of beating the defending National Champions on the road. With everything set up for the win, Anderson decided to go to the prevent defense in an effort to run out the clock.

What ensued was entirely predictable. It took a minute-and-a-half for Auburn to go 65 yards to the touchdown that made it 38-35. After recovering an onside kick the Tigers drove another 56 yards, scoring the game-winning touchdown on Michael Dyer’s one-yard plunge with thirty seconds left. Just like that, Auburn had come back to steal the game, 42-38- thanks in no small part to Gary Anderson’s decision to take his foot off the gas and play not to lose.

It’s amazing. The prevent defense almost never works. It almost always backfires. Coaches have to know this. Yet they continue to employ this nonsensical strategy every week, and every week the strategy leads either to an outright loss or a narrow escape in a game that should not have been in doubt. It’s as if they can’t help themselves.

The mentality is all wrong here. Three-and-a-half minutes are a long time in college football, where the clock stops after every first down. With a ten-point lead- particularly on the road against a more-talented opponent- it isn’t time to go into the mindset of running out the clock. The mindset needs to be: We have to get a stop, because if we get one more stop we’re going to win this game. When you go into the prevent defense you’re essentially giving your opponent free points, free momentum and a free shot at winning. You’re surrendering the initiative and reducing your margin of error to the point where one big play- in this case an onside kick- can beat you. It’s a strategy that is disastrous on its face, and yet coaches go to it time and time again. It’s an addiction that seemingly can’t be cured.

And because of it the Aggies lost a game they never should have lost.   

(I shouldn’t be too critical, though. I play college football video games and whenever I get a late lead, what do I do? I go into the prevent defense. I can’t help myself, either.)

Give Them Credit: Look, we can talk about Boise State’s weak conference schedule all we want. (Of course, Boise’s only regular-season loss the last three years was to a conference opponent, but never mind that.) We can talk about how the Broncos only play a tiny handful of games each season in which they have a realistic shot of losing. We can talk about how annoying the constant media poor-mouthing on their behalf is. We can talk about how a legitimate national power shouldn’t play on a rinky-dink blue-turf field.  We can talk about those things, and they would all be true.

But while we’re at it we should also talk about how in the last three seasons the Broncos have played Oregon, Virginia Tech and Georgia- the last two in virtual road games- and won them all. They were impressive in Saturday night’s 35-21 conquest of the Bulldogs in Atlanta, dominating time-of-possession and gathering 24 first downs to Georgia’s 13. Even the narrow 390-373 total-yardage edge is deceptive: Georgia got nearly half of those yards on the three long plays that accounted for its touchdowns. There was no doubt that the Broncos were the better team.

Could Boise go 11-1 or 12-0 with an SEC schedule? I don’t think so. Could they be an upper-echelon team in God’s Conference? I do think so. And I think they’d be an elite team in the Big 12 or Pac-12. Talk about the schedule, the conference, the media coddling and the Smurf Turf all you want. Bottom line is that three better-than-average BCS-conference teams, two of them conference champions, have had their shot at the Broncos the last three seasons. And they’ve all fallen. Talk is cheap. The scoreboard is what matters, and Boise has the scoreboard.

Passing of a Legend: The game of football lost a giant this weekend. Lee Roy Selmon, the Oklahoma All-American who went on to a Hall-of-Fame career as a defensive lineman with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, died at 56 on Sunday, two days after suffering a stroke. By all accounts Selmon, who served as athletic director for South Florida in the early 2000’s, was as decent a man off the field as he was dominant on it. A great player and a great sportsman, a legend in Norman, Oklahoma and Tampa, Florida, Mr. Selmon is gone too far early.  

 

Winners of the Week

LSU: Even without the suspended Jordan Jefferson (which may have been addition by subtraction anyway) the Tigers got the job done in their 40-27 victory over Oregon. It’s a big win, but the schedule remains murderous, with road games remaining at Mississippi State, West Virginia and Alabama- not to mention home dates against Florida, Auburn and Arkansas. It’s a shrieking bitch of a schedule, but with LSU’s defense it’s one they can handle.

South Florida: Longtime Notre Dame fans were once accustomed to a man named Holtz leading teams to victory in the shadow of the Golden Dome. In Saturday’s rain-lashed opener another man named Holtz engineered a big win in South Bend- only this was Lou’s son Skip, and he was leading the visiting South Florida Bulls. Holtz’s speedy defense forced five Irish turnovers, including a 96-yard fumble return for a score by Kayvon Webster that opened the scoring, and the Bulls opened up a 16-0 halftime lead on the way to a 23-20 upset.

Syracuse: Prior to Thursday night the Orange hadn’t beaten an FBS opponent in the Carrier Dome since November 21, 2009. For three-plus quarters it looked like that dry spell would continue, as Wake Forest took a 29-14 with 11:02 to play. But with Ryan Nassib completing his last eight pass attempts and Antwon Bailey chipping in with a 53-yard touchdown run, Syracuse rallied to tie the game and send it into overtime. The Orange would win it in the extra session, with Nassib’s four-yard scoring pass to Van Chew sealing the deal, 36-29.

Brigham Young: Bronco Mendenhall’s Cougars looked dead-on-arrival for more than three quarters at Mississippi as the Rebels built a 13-0 lead. But they woke up in the nick of time thanks to sophomore quarterback Jake Heaps and a ball-hawking defense. Heaps completed five straight passes in a 72-yard march that got BYU on the scoreboard, finishing the drive with a 19-yard strike to Ross Apo that made it 13-7 with 9:52 to play. Less than five minutes later Ole Miss quarterback Zack Stoudt fumbled on a sack, and Kyle Van Noy scooped up the bouncing ball and plunged three yards for the game-winning touchdown.

Narrow Escapes: Duke and Oregon State couldn’t withstand the challenge from FCS opponents, but several other teams did- barely. Iowa State scored with forty seconds left to edge Northern Iowa 20-19; Washington held off defending FCS Champion Eastern Washington 30-27 despite being outgained 504-250; Kansas State rallied in the fourth quarter to topple Eastern Kentucky 10-7; Texas-El Paso came from back from two touchdowns behind to defeat Stony Brook in overtime 31-24, and Wyoming scored with 22 seconds left to beat Weber State 35-32

Losers of the Week

Oregon: Once again the Ducks failed to match up physically with a top-notch BCS opponent, and their national-title hopes are done before the leaves fall. The nation’s fourth-ranked rushing team in 2010 gained just 95 yards on the ground and committed four turnovers in a decisive loss to LSU in Cowboys Stadium. Oregon’s last four games against top-ranked out-of-conference opponents- Boise State and Ohio State in 2009, Auburn in 2010 and LSU last Saturday- have all ended in losses. Chip Kelly’s fast-break offense pays big dividends against the soft defenses on the Pacific Coast, but the fun doesn’t last against opponents that hit.

Oregon State: It may have been a bad weekend in Eugene- but it was a worse one in Corvallis. Mike Riley’s Beavers were stunned 29-28 in overtime by Cal-State Sacramento, an FCS team that went a mediocre 6-5 last season. Oregon State fought back from a 21-6 fourth-quarter deficit to take a 28-21 lead in overtime, only to lose when the Hornets rallied for a touchdown and a two-point conversion. In 2008 and ’09 the Beavers went into the final week of the regular season with a shot at the Rose Bowl. Now they’ve lost five of six dating back to last season, including unsightly home defeats to Washington State and Sacramento State.

Notre Dame: Irish fans might have thought their team had turned the corner during 2010’s season-ending four-game winning streak. If so, they’re now probably thinking differently. Notre Dame was horrendous during Saturday’s twice rain-delayed 23-20 loss to South Florida, turning the ball over five times, coming up empty on four separate trips inside the Bulls’ fifteen-yard line and driving head coach Brian Kelly into a series of sideline meltdowns. Despite piling up 508 yards to the visitor’s 254, the Irish are 0-1 with back-to-back tough tests against Michigan and Michigan State looming.

Midwestern Weather: A week of sweltering weather in the country’s midsection broke in violent fashion during the weekend, disrupting several games in the process. Notre Dame’s home opener against South Florida was interrupted by two separate weather delays lasting nearly three combined hours. Rain and lightning held up Iowa’s opener against Tennessee Tech for nearly an hour and a half, while Michigan’s home opener against Western Michigan was called on account of weather with less than two minutes left in the third quarter and the Wolverines leading, 34-10. Sunday was more of the same, as West Virginia’s 34-13 win over Marshall in Morgantown was delayed twice and finally called off at the beginning of the fourth quarter.

Big 12: The ship known as the Big 12 is sinking- and the rats are fleeing in droves. Texas A&M has informed the conference it plans to leave- hopefully for the SEC- effective next June 30. Oklahoma is openly courting offers from other conferences. Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, Missouri and Texas (the 800-pound gorilla that caused this entire mess) are nervously scanning possible exits. If you enjoy Big 12 football (and basketball, for that matter) better enjoy these next several months. Because by this time next year, the conference will join its predecessors, the Big Eight and Southwest Conference, in the dustbin of history.

 

Next: Ohio State will be back in action Saturday at noon, when Akron’s fellow MAC member Toledo invades the Horseshoe. The Rockets are a solid pick to contend for the MAC West title and they started off in style, rolling up 591 total yards in a 58-22 rout of New Hampshire. It’s just Toledo, but it will be a step up from Akron and a somewhat stiffer challenge for this youthful Buckeye team.