The coach is coming off of another disappointing 9-4 season where his team challenged for nothing meaningful. In the last five seasons, his squad is 36-25. His teams have won a couple of National Championships over the years (and were robbed of another), but it has been 22 years since the last one. In the meantime, he has taught hundreds of young men, has been a great ambassador for his university, and a wonderfully cranky media target. Still, sizable portions of his fans believe the team would be better off without him.

The year is 2034. The coach is Jim Tressel. Read More...

We are now less than seven days away which officially makes it game week. Tressel and the boys leave town tomorrow for a trip to the Bayou to hopefully right a lot of wrongs from a year ago. If nothing else, the team has the motivation for it. Not only is last year's game a reminder, so is just about every talking head, including Kirk Herbstreit, who keep citing the mythological speed advantage. Certainly speed can be a factor when one team is unsure of their assignments. As Mark Dantonio used to say when he was our defensive coordinator, we play our best when we play fast, we play fast when we know our keys, we know our keys with excellent preparation. Here's hoping for excellent preparation.

At this point, I don't have a lot ready to post but I hope to bring something new each day this week. I did, however, watch an inordinate amount of football the last few days. I especially focused on the Big Ten teams and if there's one takeaway to be remember, it's turnovers are gigantic momentum shifters. Sure, that's cliche but Michigan State would have a victory and Michigan would have had a rather simple win over Florida if only they could have held onto the ball. Fortunately for the Wolverines, they won despite Mike Hart. Ohio State doesn't need to play perfect Monday night but they can't win if they turn it over 4 times.

The constant cold rain kept handcuffs on any possible aerial attack so Ohio State turned to Beanie Wells. Michigan was in the same predicament and they turned to Mike Hart...or tried to anyway. It sounds trivial but it came down to which team could run the ball? Who has the best back? And the emphatic answers were Ohio State and Beanie Wells.

Indeed, Wells was the man of The Game. His 222 yards on 39 totes came largely against a sold out run defense from Michigan. Move over Troy, Beanie is the new Michigan assassin.

The 14-3 victory was more than just Wells, though. On the other side of the ball, Michigan was harassed and beaten by a swarming Silver Bullet defense. The numbers are strong if not staggering: 91 total yards for blue, Vernon Gholston with 3 sacks and additional TFL and - for good measure - two more dropped interceptions. The Buckeyes are Big Ten Champions and hope is still alive for a trip to New Orleans.

How fortunate must Youngstown State feel right now? Although Jim Tressel hasn't coached at YSU since 2000, that hasn't disconnected the tie that binds. It was announced today that Jim and Ellen Tressel, along with Ellen's parents, have donated $1 million to Youngstown State. The money is earmarked for the athletic department in hopes of building a new indoor athletic facility, which is to be named the WATTS Center (Watson and Tressel Training Site).

This newest donation isn't anything new. It's only one of several Tressel has made in recent memory.

In January 2003, he and Ellen donated $125,000 to YSU for a student recreation facility. Ellen's parents, Frank and Norma Watson, matched that with another $125,000.

Later that year, the Tressels jumpstarted a foundation to support cancer research, the Tressel Family Fund, with a $62,000 donation to the James Cancer Center.

On top of that, the Tressels donated $100,000 to the Ohio State library renovation in 2006. He also basically 'returned' an undisclosed amount of money to the AD for the WHAC renovation project. If you aren't keeping a tally, that's at least $1.3 million in total. And, those are just the ones we know about.

It's one thing to preach Woody's mantra of Paying Forward, it's entirely another to live the credo.

It's en vogue to do a competitive analysis of your opponent. Sprinkle in a little hype like, say, calling this year's game the biggest ever and an analysis is especially mandatory, right? No, not for me. I thought about doing one, highlighting UM's strengths and weaknesses and then showing where we'll attack and how. The problem with that is you usually have to parse information, statistics - any metric or data to come to conclusions. And, I don't want to parse.

That doesn't mean I don't have an opinion. Oh, I do and in fact, I wouldn't call it an opinion but rather a certifiable truth and it is this: Jim Tressel will have something for Michigan that we haven't seen much of this year, if at all. I'm not talking about a single play or a series of them, I'm talking about the overall gameplan. We've seen a little bit of this strategy already this year. Texas we used an inordinate amount of pre-snap shifts to force the defense to realign. At Iowa, we motioned Pittman and Beanie out of the backfield all night. At Northwestern, we used tackle over and heavy formations quite often.

If we go back to last year in Ann Arbor, it was evident there as well. Early on, it was apparent we were going to have trouble with Alan Branch. The remedy? Enter Andre Tyree, a 300 lb "tight end" that effectively neutralized Branch. Tyree's season minutes up to that point probably could be counted on one hand. Expect another round of strategy Saturday. Who or what will be this year's Tyree?
(Edit: Comments are screwy. For some reason, it transferred old ones to this entry. Just go with it.)