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.