October 1 - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly - Iowa Recap

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. It’s my weekly critique of The Ohio State University football performance.

Ohio State traveled to Iowa for a Saturday night game.

In the game, OSU beat Iowa 38-17 to maintain it’s #1 ranking and improve their record to 5-0.

Ohio State has now beat three top 25 teams, including two of them on the road. Their average winning margin in those three games was 20 points.

THE GOOD

• Scoring Defense – OSU now ranks as #5 in the country at 9.8 points per game. That number should only get better in the next few weeks.

• James Laurenitis – He has put up great numbers in every game. He now has four interceptions inn five games, as a sophomore.

• Antonio Pittman – 117 yards on 25 attempts. Many of those attempts were throw- away runs into the middle of the field. Every time he went wide, he ran for a while.

• Troy Smith – 16-25 and 4 TDs. He IS the Heisman frontrunner. Don’t fall for that Brady Quinn resurgence. Notre Dame hasn’t and won’t play anyone other than #ichigan this year.

THE BAD

• Poor tackling – Iowa had two long scoring drives that were enabled by continued poor tacking techniques.

• Injury – Starting free safety Anderson Russell suffered a season ending knee injury. The upside is that this is the first significant injury for the Bucks and it didn’t come till game five.

THE UGLY

• Officiating– The instant replay official missed an obvious catch by Teddy Ginn. Additionally, I believe it’s called “pass interference” if a defender grabs a receiver’s jersey when the ball is in the air. The evidence is provided below. There was no flag on this play.

My WTF moment came when the polls came out. Three media votes did not put Ohio State #1 despite Ohio State 5-0 record in September, including 3-0 against top 25 teams.

The aberrant votes went to Auburn and West Virginia. WTF are you thinking?

Ohio State hosts Bowling Green this week. The early line has OSU favored by 34.5 points.

It should be noted that Ohio State has covered the spread in 12 straight games. This is unheard of in the sports betting world. If you would have bet $5 on Ohio State at the beginning of this streak and let it ride every game, your initial Lincoln investment would now be worth $10,250.

GO BUCKS.