No it wasn’t good enough

I’ve got no illusions of being happy about yesterday’s game against USC. We lost, and it doesn’t matter that we only lost by 3 to a team that beat us by 32 a year ago.

As Eleven Warriors put it so perfectly this morning, “Moral Victories are for those who delight in fear.”

We should have won that game and we failed. We outplayed USC on every drive except our first one and their last one. But those two drives led to 15 of USC’s 18 points and they cost us the game.

It’s heartbreaking and soul-numbing, but we’ve now gone from the team that gets crushed in big games to the team that gets squeaked in the 4th quarter of big games. 3 times in a row, we’ve held the lead late and lost to teams we should have taken down.

Yes, there’s plenty of blame to go around for this game, and we could easily find a dozen reasons to look back and say “there’s the reason we lost”;

• Terrelle Pryor needed to throw the ball and not get sacked with 7 minutes left
• Jim Tressel needed to run the clock better at the end of the half
• Boom Herron needed to choose his holes better

But the one play that brings me the pain of a headache buried just behind the eyeballs was the first play of our final failed drive.

With 1 minute to play, Pryor lined up at the Buckeyes’ 36-yard-line.  The Trojans showed blitz before the ball was snapped, and with a full two seconds before the snap, the USC corner left Posey on the right side to rush.  No weak side help advanced to the line and our leading WR was left without any defense.

Pryor didn’t see it.  If at any moment he had glanced to his right, he would have had a 20, possibly 30 yard gain.  But he called for the snap and released the ball out of bounds to his left.

And to add insult to injury, the boys in stripes called it intentional grounding, a penalty they deemed unfit for USC’s quarterback, Tebow 2.0.

As for the positives from this game, they are plentiful;

• The defense held USC to zero first-quarter yards, and kept them from getting a first down until the second quarter.
• USC had 11 drives.  6 of them were for UNDER five total yards.
• Joe McKnight was held to a meager 60 rushing yards.

But it wasn’t enough.

Now comes the Ohio State fans who discovered Buckeye football sometime late 2002, and they’ll be screaming for Tressel’s head.  We just have to outlast them because their anger will subside eventually and they’ll quiet down.  Sooner or later, Jon and Kate will have an outburst, Octo-mom will adopt two more kids, a tea-party rally will spring up somewhere, and all their retarded anger will be diverted to that for a while.

But we will not be disappearing. We are stronger for that loss, as we should be. But there’s only one way to move forward…..by crushing Toledo next Saturday afternoon.

Today, I am upset at my team’s loss.

But I am wearing my Ohio State jersey anyway.  I’m proud to be a Buckeye no matter what the score, and you won’t get me to hide that pride.  The jersey gets worn today and it gets worn with my head held high.

Haters will not dissuade me.

For I am a Buckeye.