I sure hope tonight’s game can tide us all over for the next eight months.
My prediction for the game: I believe Ohio State will win in a close one. Let’s go with a score of 24-20.
In the end, I just think Jim Tressel is a better coach than Les Miles. Talent is important in college football, but let’s face it–these two teams are loaded and the actual gap between the two is minimal, despite the perception out there. It will come down to which team is better prepared, which team is more sound and which team makes the fewest mistakes on a huge national stage. In this case, I believe Tressel’s track record is more reliable than Miles’.
The betting odds on the game are currently at 3.5 points in favor of LSU, which leads me to wonder why there is continuing talk of a Tiger blowout.
Certainly, the memory of last season’s Buckeye debacle is still fresh in everyone’s minds. All season long, we have heard endless bromides about SEC ‘speed’, which somehow didn’t manage to help Florida against Michigan, didn’t help Tennessee blow out Wisconsin and really failed Arkansas against Missouri. When an SEC team wins an out-of-conference game, it is invariably because of ‘speed’, whereas a loss is, well, explained away for other reasons.
(Aside: I think the term ‘speed’ is a code word used by some analysts who are really trying to point to the racial makeup of certain programs. I’ll leave it at that for now.)
The question for me in this game is how much will Miles continue to hamstring his team by not playing the best players at the two key positions on offense? Matt Flynn is just not as good as Ryan Perrilloux at quarterback, and Jacob Hester is not in the same league as Keiland Williams as a runner. In my opinion, this is the key to this game. By playing Flynn and Hester, LSU has basically ceded its athletic advantage over the Buckeyes at those spots and, ironically, makes itself a standard Big Ten-type of team. In that case, they are playing on Ohio State’s field.
It could be that Miles lucks into playing the right guys, whether through injury or due to ineffectiveness. But he could save a lot of trouble by playing them right off the bat. He won’t, though. He will dance with the girl that brung him for as long as possible and we will hear a lot from the commentators about the ‘reliabity’, ‘leadership’ and ‘toughness’ of Flynn and Hester–you know, all the things that can’t really be measured or quantified when watching the game and, as a result, are irrefutable.
Turning the focus on the Heisman, this game also means a lot for the 2008 campaign. This could be the coming out party for Chris Wells, who I have tabbed as the front runner for next season’s award. If he has a big game, he’s the clear leader.
No, the front runner is NOT Tim Tebow, as I wrote here even before the loss to Michigan. Heismandment No. 9 states there will never be another two-time winner and it is already exerting its will on the Florida phenom. The news that the Gators will go to a two-quarterback system next season does not bode well for a repeat, nor does the probable emergence of a legitimate running game.
Anyway, it’s been a remarkable season. There’s been talk of split titles, but I don’t think it will happen. It could have happened if the Rose Bowl had had the gumption to bring USC and Georgia together, but I think that after the Ohio State win, it will all be moot.
On another note, I was 7-4 picking against the spread this bowl season (barring tonight’s game) and am now 73-67-2 on the year. Not the strongest year, but still above .500 and still would’ve made money if I had been betting with regularity at an online sportsbook.
Thanks to everyone who followed the season with me. HP is about to undergo a site re-design and then we’ll keep it going all throughout the offseason, talking about everything we can possibly talk about. Keep coming back and we’ll continue to get bigger and better.
Enjoy the game.
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