Ohio St. 76 - 5 Miami (Ohio) (Final)

I'm sorry, Miami of Ohio fans, but you don't deserve the usual post for a new UCFC applicant.  The score in this game was 49-5 at the half, and things didn't get any better in the second half.  The Redhawks were playing for the Big Gold Trophy, and we expect more of the Old College Try than a 71-point defeat.

With today's game, the exhibition phase of OSU's season has come to an end.  Let's see how they've done so far:

08/31/19:  Ohio St. 45 - 21 Florida Atlantic
09/07/19:  Ohio St. 42 - 0 Cincinnati
09/14/19:  Indiana 10 - 51 Ohio St.
09/21/19:  Ohio St. 76 - 5 Miami (Ohio)

Who would have thought that Florida Atlantic would be the most competitive team on that list?

But give credit where credit is due.  Ohio State has looked very good so far.  Now let's see who they play in the regular season:

09/28/19:  at Nebraska
10/05/19:  MICHIGAN ST.
10/18/19:  at Northwestern
10/26/19:  (13) WISCONSIN
11/09/19:  MARYLAND
11/16/19:  at Rutgers
11/23/19:  (13) PENN ST.
11/30/19:  at (11) Michigan

(That's not a typo.  Wisconsin and Penn State tied for 13th place in last week's poll.)

Now Wisconsin crushed Michigan 35-14 today, so the Badgers will move up and the Wolverines will move down.  But you will note that OSU has Wisconsin at home and Michigan on the road, so that's a favorable development for the Buckeyes.

Right now, it appears that OSU will be favored in all of its remaining games, and will be heavily favored in all of the games except for the one against Wisconsin, where the Buckeyes will be at home.  College football is a crazy sport, and we've all seen odd things happen, but right now you have to think that OSU will be extremely disappointed if they don't keep the Big Gold Trophy through the end of November.

Indiana 10 - 51 Ohio St. (Final)

The Hoosiers put up even less resistance than expected.  OSU rolls to another easy win.

Indiana 3 - 23 Ohio St. (8:30 left in 2d Quarter)

Well, that was pretty easy.  Starting from a 1st and 15 on its own 20, OSU began with a 56-yard run by J.K. Dobbins (of LaGrange H.S. in LaGrange, Tex.)  Four plays later, Justin Fields tossed his second touchdown pass of the game, this one a 9-yarder to K.J. Hill (of N. Little Rock H.S. in Little Rock, Ark.)

ESPN's gametracker now gives OSU a 96.5 percent chance of victory.  That's good enough for me, so this blog will take the rest of the afternoon off, unless something really amazing happens.

Indiana 3 - 16 Ohio St. (10:15 left in 2d Quarter)

OSU is starting to impose its will on this game.  The Bucks' defense stopped IU three and out, and then Chris Olave -- the same guy who just caught a touchdown pass -- blocked the punt.  The ball rolled out of the back of the end zone for a safety, and OSU had two more points.  They'll also get the ball back.

Indiana 3 - 14 Ohio St. (11:26 left in 2d Quarter)

A lovely drive by OSU there.  The Buckeyes hammered IU with a strong running game, and then a fake handoff turned into an easy 37-yard pass from Fields to Chris Olave (from Mission Hills H.S. in San Marcos, Calif.)  Olave was about 4 yards behind everyone else, and it looked for all the world as though he and Fields were playing catch in a very large back yard.  Blake Habeil (of Canisius H.S. in Buffalo, N.Y.) added the extra point, and OSU now has an 11-point lead.

Indiana 3 - 7 Ohio St. (13:50 left in 2d Quarter)

The OSU defense holds without too much trouble, and IU punts to the OSU 37.

So far OSU had 135 total yards to 60 for Indiana.

Indiana 3 - 7 Ohio St. (46 seconds left in 1st Quarter)

So far the Hoosiers are giving it the old college try.  OSU had one drive that ended on a missed field goal, another that ended on a 3-yard touchdown run by QB Justin Fields (of Harrison H.S. in Kennesaw, Ga.), and another that ended in a punt.  IU has only had one decent drive, which ended in a field goal by Logan Justus (of Mt. Vernon H.S. in McCordsville, Ind.)

And now, at the end of the first quarter, IU has the ball, facing 2d and 3 on its own 25.

We are on FOX, and we have the ever-excellent Gus Johnson on the mike.

Indiana v. Ohio St.

Today's match-up has great historic resonance -- for fans of college basketball.  Bobby Knight famously played on an OSU team that won the national championship in 1960, then later coached Indiana to national titles in 1976, 1981, and 1987.  But that was basketball, not football.

In football, OSU leads the all-time series 74-12-5.  There are few series with more than 90 meetings that features so few interesting games.  The Buckeyes have not lost to the Hoosiers since 1988.  Here are the last three match-ups in the series:

10/08/2016:  Ohio St. 38 - 17 Indiana
08/31/2017:  Indiana 21 - 49 Ohio St.
10/06/2018:  Ohio St. 49 - 26 Indiana

This week, Ohio State is ranked number 6 in the country by the AP.  Indiana is 2-0 after wins over Ball State and Eastern Illinois, but the Hoosiers are unranked.  The folks in Vegas have OSU as an 18-point favorite in a game where they expect 60 points.  That would be a 39-21 victory for the Bucks, which would be relatively consistent with recent history.

Indiana

In 1967, Indiana had a miracle football season, one in which they won an amazing number of close game.  They beat Kentucky 12-10.  Then they beat Kansas 18-15.  They beat Iowa 21-17.  They beat Michigan 27-20, Wisconsin 14-9, Michigan State 14-13, and Purdue 19-14.  At the end of the year they were 9-1, they were number 4 in the country, and they were the Big 10 champs.  They were also the subject of a great article by Dan Jenkins in Sports Illustrated.  They went to the Rose Bowl, where O.J. Simpson and USC beat them 14-3.

And that's pretty much it for the history of Indiana football.  John Pont, who coached that Indiana team, never went to another bowl game.  Indiana's last bowl win came in 1991, when they won the Copper Bowl.  Their last appearance in the year-end AP poll was in 1988, when they won the Libirty Bowl and finished number 20.  Their big rivalry game is with Purdue, where they play for the Old Oaken Buckey.  The Hoosiers trail in that series 41-74-6.  But today they have their chance to make history as they host the Big Gold Trophy and the OSU Buckeyes.  I'm a skeptic, but as the saying goes, that's why they play the games.

Ohio St. 42 - 0 Cincinnati (Final)

Not much more to say about this game, although it was a very solid performance for a Buckeye team that had been favored by 15, and won by 42.  The Bearcats were just never competitive.

Ohio St. 21 - 0 Cincinnati (7:26 left in 2d Quarter)

J.K. Dobbins just broke a 60-yard run to put the Buckeyes up by three touchdowns midway through the second quarter.  I have some errands to run, so unless something truly shocking happens, I will wrap up this week's game coverage after the game is over.  It looks as though next week, OSU will be taking the Big Gold Trophy to Bloomington, Ind. for their first conference game of the year.

Ohio St 14 - 0 Cincinnati (8:03 left in 2d Quarter)

OSU forces a three-and-out.  Cincinnati punts, and the Buckeyes will start from their own 39 yard line.

Ohio St. 14 - 0 Cincinnati (8:14 left in 2d Quarter)

The Buckeyes kept going down the field and scored on a 7-yard run by J.K. Dobbins, a junior from LaGrange H.S. in LaGrange, Tex.  OSU now leads 14-0, and ESPN gives them a 92.5 percent chance of victory.

Ohio St. 7 - 0 Cincinnati (11:10 left in the 2d Quarter)

So far, this has been a very competitive game.  The Buckeyes scored with 8:28 left in the first quarter on a 7-yard run by QB Justin Fields.  UC had a long drive that went deep into OSU territory, but ended on a blocked field goal.  And now OSU has a first down at the Cincinnati 43.

Ohio St. v. Cincinnati

One of my favorite facts about the OSU Buckeyes is that they have not lost to a team from the state of Ohio since 1921, when they were beaten by . . . Oberlin.  Since then, they've gone undefeated against the rest of the state.  Of course, for much of that time they generally refused to play the rest of the state.  But they do have close to 50 wins against Ohio competition since that Oberlin defeat.

The Bucks don't play Cincinnati much at all.  They have an all-time record of 14-2 against the Bearcats.  UC lost three games in a row to OSU between 1893 and 1895, then beat the Bucks in 1896 and 1897.  Since then, they've only met 11 times, and OSU has won them all.  OSU and UC didn't meet at all from 1931 to 1999.  However, this will be their sixth meeting since then.

Of course, no reference to OSU and Cincinnati is complete without a discussion of one of the most dramatic rivalries in the history of college basketball.  In the late 1950's and early 1960's, OSU would not play UC in college hoops, even though the Bearcats had one of the best teams in the country -- due in part to their willingness to play African-Americans like Oscar Robertson, who weren't exactly welcome at schools like OSU and Kentucky.  In 1960, OSU won the NCAA championship with a loaded team featuring sophomores Jerry Lucas and John Havlichek.  Since those two guys were back for their junior and senior years, and since they're both Hall of Famers, the Buckeyes were in really good shape.  And sure enough, OSU returned to the national championship game in both 1961 and 1962.  But both times, Cincinnati was waiting for them -- and both times, Cincinnati beat the team that refused to play them in the regular season.

Anyway, the bookmakers have installed OSU as a 15 point favorite in a game where the over-under is 52.  That would imply a final score of something like 34-18 for the Buckeyes.  Given that UC beat UCLA 24-14 last week, that would be a solid outcome for OSU.

Cincinnati

The City of Cincinnati is part of a network of cities laid out along the big rivers of the Midwest and South in the early parts of the 19th century.  Louisville and St. Louis are also in this group.  These days, when the East Coast struggles to distinguish the various parts of Middle America from one another, these cities tend to get lumped in with the rest of their states in the national mind.  But the river folk who established these cities were often of very different mettle than the Baptists, Methodists, and Calvinists living on farms and in villages throughout Ohio, Kentucky, and Missouri.  The river folk created their own society -- very different from that of both your typical small town, and your big cities of the East Coast.  They were a raffish, shiny, braggadocious sort of people -- tough, and shrewd, and very good at making money and playing games.  Pete Rose, who grew up in Cincinnati (where he attended Western Hill High School) is a good representative of this type.

These cities had their own universities -- separate from the lordly and vast institutions that took the names of their states, and created the big conferences that came to dominate college football.  But those universities were historically excluded from the inner sanctums of the game.  Instead, they wandered like nomads from conference to conference, mostly playing against their own kind.

For example, since World War II the University of Cincinnati has competed in the Mid-American Conference, the Missouri Valley Conference, Conference-USA, the Big East, and it now plays in the American Athletic Conference.  It also spent much of this time -- including every season from 1970 to 1995 -- as an independent.  That's a tough way to build a football program, and so Cincinnati has always been on the outskirts of Big-Time Football.

But things have trended upward in recent years.  The never-ending demand for football on TV has made it easier for schools like Cincinnati to make money and grow their fanbase.  As of 1996, the Bearcats had only ever appeared in three bowl games -- the last of which had been in 1951.  Since then, Cincinnati has gone to 15 bowl games -- including the 2009 Orange Bowl and the 2010 Sugar Bowl.  In fall of 2009, UC went undefeated in the regular season, dominating the Big East Conference and getting all the way up to number 5 in the AP Poll.   Before the Sugar Bowl, however, Coach Brian Kelly announced he was leaving for Notre Dame, and the Bearcats haven't reached that same level since.  They have remained very competitive, though, and last week they beat UCLA.  So it will be interesting to see how they do against OSU.

Ohio St. 45 - 21 Florida Atlantic (Final)

There really wasn't much to this game.  OSU scored three easy touchdowns in the first few minutes, and then spent the rest of the afternoon on cruise control.  So they hold the Big Gold Trophy for another week.