Buckeyes Warm Up For No. 2 Texas

By Paul Smith
paul.smith@collegeblitz.com

COLUMBUS -- Joe Novak, who grew up in the typically football-crazy northeast Cleveland suburban of Mentor -- "Lee Tressel (Ohio State coach Jim Tressel's father) coached me in junior high," he said last week -- was no dummy.

Years of being Bill Mallory's key assistant during a rare Indiana run of success (the Hoosiers actually beat and tied the Buckeyes during the seven-year stretch), plus resuscitating a long-dormant Northern Illinois program were well-documented resume-fillers.

The Buckeyes knew this from the git-go Saturday. This is the Northern Illinois of the no-joke era, coming off what Novak called a "disappointing" 7-5 season, but a program which has produced uber-upsets of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and Iowa State in Ames and a home stunner over Maryland and near-miss the following season in College Park.

"I think a lot of this ballgame is what we expected," said Tressel the Younger, who takes his No. 1 Buckeyes to Austin this Saturday night to face the No. 3 Texas Longhorns. "...That is we were against a tough football team who happened to have a great back (Garrett Wolfe, who zigged and zagged for 171 terrific yards and caught a four-yard fourth quarter touchdown pass)."

Beside the Matterhornian task of going against the nation's No. 1 team, that, unfortunately, was the problem for Northern. Ohio State knew the Huskie playbook almost as well as its owners.

The Huskies came into one of college football's most forbidding sanctuaries with the highest of hopes. Within a quarter plus the first five seconds of the second quarter, the Buckeyes had a dizzying T.K.O., a 28-0 lead that sucked the competitive air out of the Big Horseshoe.

It was the old story about the 22-point underdog having to pitch a perfect game and hope its offense could find just enough, and hope the big guys on the other side of the ball got caught looking head.

Never happened. "I was hoping to come in and give them a little better test than we did, quite obviously," Novak told the Chicago Tribune's Reid Hanley. "But we got in the hole so much, so quickly, that it was a struggle getting out.

"I voted them No. 1 in the preseason poll and will vote them No. 1 this week...It was like a tidal wave."

It was a little Troy Smith (Buckeyes Heisman Trophy Candidate #1) and a little Ted Ginn Jr. (H.T.C. #2) and an overwhelming Ohio State defense that simply threw a stone wall at the Huskies for the majority of the first half.

"For the most part, I thought we did a good job the whole way around," said Smith, who connected on 18 of 25 passes (three dropped) for 297 yards, good for touchdowns of 5 and 58 yards to Ginn to open the scoring, and a 15-yarder to Anthony Gonzalez that put the Bucks up 21-0 at quarter's end.

Chris Wells' eight-yard T.D. misdirection smash off right guard on the second quarter's first play closed out the competitive portion of the game

"Offensively, I think the guys up front did exactly what we game planned to do, get a 100-yard rusher every game (in this case Antonio Pittman, who ran for 111 in 19 attempts, including the Bucks' last T.D. to open the final quarter),"
Smith added. "...(also) Protect the quarterback, and we did just that."

What kept it from being absolute perfection was the grittiness of the Huskies, who persisted in keeping Wolfe as part of their offensive equation, which resulted in a hellacious fourth-quarter, drive-to-paydirt catch of a hurried Phil Horvath dart, then slithering through three Buckeyes defenders to the end zone.

That got the attention of defensive tackle Quinn Pitcock. "He's very fast and has great vision," Pitcock told the Tribune's Teddy Greenstein. "I wish him the best with the Heisman race (and yes, Wolfe is that good), but we still have my buddy (Smith) here next to me (at the post-game press conference in the Wolstein Center) who I'm rooting for."

Northern Illinois can take some consolation in outscoring Ohio State 9-7 in the second half. After the 15 minute, 5-second tsunami the Bucks set off against a proud, decent Northern defense, they were at least partly entitled to a bit of a letdown.

Fortunately in this case, the Bucks aren't coached by one Charlie Weis, who labors about 250 miles to the northwest, because you can be sure there would have been some post-game witticisms about "The second quarter country club" or maybe "Welcome to the Buckeye Lounge."

Tressel just shrugged. The day had been wayyyyy too successful to think deep negative coachly thoughts. "Sometimes when you get an early lead, you get a little bit sloppy," he said, almost apologetically. Yeah, coach that was definitely your fault!

Kidding. While the 103,896 (save 3-4,000 N.I.U. loyalists) left the stadium thinking about revenge in Austin, most raved about Wolfe as well. But on this day, even though the 5-feet, 7-inch, 177-pound Huskie senior accounted for 285 of his team's 343 offensive yards, he had to settle for co-billing with Smith and Ginn.

Ginn, a junior who had frozen the Notre Dame secondary several times in the Buckeyes 34-20 rout of Weis's Fighting Irish, was a key player in an Ohio State offensive variety show that might draw Broadway raves by mid-season.

He sprung almost unmolested through the Huskies secondary, catching a wide open bomb that would have been a 77 yard touchdown but for a fantabulous diving open-field effort by cornerback Alvah Hansbro, but instead became a 54-yarder that set up a more earthly 5-yard catch from Smith. But his 58-yard T.D. reception was a clone of the first bomb and had the Huskies d-backs jittery for the rest of the half.

It was a post-game session dominated by captains and seniors, so it was left to Smith and others to explain the constant one-step-ahead offense that accounted for 488 yards and 22 first downs.

"Sometimes," Smith said, asked if he sometimes allowed himself the luxury to buy the extra second for Ginn to break free against single coverage. "If it's all within the route, then we'll call it."

Hell, Smith called his passes to Ginn when the two clanked around in leathery kiddo football uniforms on the glass-strewn dirt fields of Cleveland's rawhide-tough east side.

"If it's always in the play that we call, protection is there," Smith added. "You have to give the receiver enough time to get open, any receiver, not just Ted."

It was also a day where Smith worked behind an airtight pass-blocking scheme. Twenty five attempts, maybe 1-2 pressures all afternoon. Smith, who played with Ginn at Cleveland's Glenville High School and had earned a solid reputation not only as an efficient pocket passer, but one of college football's best scramblers, was strictly Mr. Dropback Saturday.

He could only grimace, then chuckle when Tressel referenced his one madcap scramble on something of a busted play in the third quarter.

"One time I called a run where (Smith) had a chance to run," Tressel recalled with that Robert DeNiro smirky smile. "He looked like me running out there. So we're going to have to get back and get a little bit better at that maybe."
Tough day for critics. Tougher day for Huskies.

"When you play a team like that, it exposes what you're not good at," Novak told Hanley. "If you play Cupcake U., you don't really know what you have when the game's over."

Which brings us to the first of what should be, oh, at least a dozen armageddons, at least one playing on a campus near you.

"I think that's the whole thing (about facing a rangy, speedy Texas defense)," Tressel said finally. "If you can have playmakers at every position (the Bucks assuredly do -- for example, powerback Chris Wells impressed with 50 rushing yards in 10 tries and Anthony Gonzalez caught four passes for 53 yards), and an offensive line that can protect the passer and knock people off the ball with run blocking, you have a chance to have a good offense..."

With the sure-handed, steady play of Pitcock, big David Patterson, plus despite the graduation loss of a stunning linebacker corps of Bobby Carpenter/A.J. Hawk/Anthony Schlegel, a strong linebacking performance by James Laurinaitis, middle backer John Kerr and rangy MarcusFreeman and a solid, if unproven secondary, the good news is the Buckeyes still have a pretty stout defense.

Texas coach Mack Brown should have one major league Austin City Limits hoedown trying to dissect these tapes.