A great many people have criticized OSU for having a weak schedule this year.  From the tenor of the comments, you would think that there is some person out there who is picking OSU’s schedule to avoid tough teams.  You would also think that no other highly ranked team had a weak schedule this year.  There are three things wrong with these ideas.

First, having a weak schedule does not mean that you are a weak team.  Hawaii has a weak schedule, but if they put a serious beat down on Georgia (unlikely) in the Sugar Bowl, I am going to have to concede that they are one of the top teams in college football.


Second, no one at OSU is intentionally picking a weak schedule for OSU.  For instance, Jim Tressel had a vote to rank the teams in the final BCS.  Did he pick a weak team as Number 2 so that he could play a patsy?  No.  He reports that he voted for LSU because he felt that any discussion of who the best teams in the nation were started with who won their conference championship.  Many (for some reason) continue to preach that LSU is the best team in the nation.  If Tressel was part of a cabal at OSU which was dedicated to picking weak teams, then why would he pick LSU as his number two team, promoting them from 7 to 2?

Further, during the last few years of the Cooper era, the Ohio Legislature passed a law which stated that OSU had to play at least one other Ohio school each year (in an effort to keep money within the state).  I don’t think that is a good law, but it certainly didn’t come to us from the folks in the OSU athletic department.  So now people will say, why play three Ohio Schools (YSU, Akron, and Kent State) in the same year?  Here’s why:

Akron was set to be the one Ohio school for this year.  But there came open an opportunity to play YSU, a team where Jim Tressel coached for 15 years before coming to OSU.  YSU is trying to raise money for a new football facility and was about $600k short.  Over the past two years, Jim Tressel has donated one million dollars of his own money to YSU for the building of that facility.  Tressel came to the OSU athletic department and mentioned that if we could play YSU, it would mean $650k for their program, which would put them over the top.  Frankly, I thought it was a cool thing to do.

As for Kent State, Jim Tressel does not like bye weeks.  He sought to fill a game into that void.  The game was played October 13, 2007.  That being the middle of the college football season, few teams were available to be played that weekend.  If you can find me a top 20 team that also had a bye week for October 13, 2007, then you can start criticizing OSU for playing Kent State.

Third, OSU can’t control its conference schedule, so if the Big Ten is on a down year, then there is nothing that OSU can do about it.  But it can control its non-conference schedule.  This year, we played Washington at Washington.  And people criticize us for that because Washington ended up this year 4-8.  But when you schedule non-conference games, you do it about seven years in advance.  Go back 7 years ago and look at how Washington was viewed back then.  I think that Don James was still their coach and it was a PAC 10 powerhouse.  Back then, it was a serious team and you did not want to go to their house and play them if you were looking for an easy schedule.

Now let’s look at a team whose supporters (like Trojan, who posts in here quite a bit) criticize OSU for having a weak schedule.  OSU beat 5  teams this year who ended up with a winning record.  USC beat two teams this year with a winning record, and only played three teams who ended up with a winning record.  So a little less of it from the hypocrites’ corner would be a nice touch.

That said, it is a bit unfair to criticize USC or OSU for how their opponents ended up their seasons.  Few teams remain in the top 20 after OSU or USC play them.  Nebraska looks like a pile of crap at the end of this year, but they were ranked when USC beat them in Lincoln.  Thus the discussion should focus on the ranking of the team when your team plays them, not how they do later in the year when they have another loss on their record courtesy your team.  Home and away should also be considered, and OSU played a ranked Purdue, a ranked PSU and a ranked Michigan away.

One last thing for consideration.  OSU is playing USC in Los Angeles next year, and USC in Columbus the year after that.  How about that for a weak schedule?  You have to hand it to those Trojans.  They don’t duck anybody.

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