Alabama Will Ride Tide, Devour Ohio State in BCS Championship

It's been almost 22 years, that's 8,006 days if you're counting, since Ohio State last beat a Southeastern Conference football team. On that halcyon day, Sept. 24, 1988, an anniversary that might as well be a national holiday in Ohio, the mighty Buckeyes beat LSU, 36-33.

Since that victory, over a generation ago, Ohio State has been the proverbial drum upon which the SEC has enacted ritual big-game beatings. One after another after another. If you think 22 years is a long time -- you probably haven't seen the haircuts still popular in Ohio -- but that's small potatoes, really. It could be worse. In the entire course of the Buckeye football program, Ohio State has never beaten the SEC in a bowl game. Of course, the last two bowl beatings were the most painful of all, pimp-slap disrespect in the national championship games at the hands of both Florida and LSU.

All of which means that William Faulkner, who doubtlessly saw deep into the SEC's future with Ohio State when he wrote, "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past," was prescient. The 2010 college football season boils down to answering a single question: which of the four or five SEC teams that are better than the Buckeyes gets to pummel Ohio State in the BCS title game in January?

The answer is easy: Alabama.

Quick, what do Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Eastern Michigan and Marshall have in common besides football mediocrity? Yep, they all play Ohio State to begin the season. Skitter past a mediocre Miami team that continues to live off its past glory and Ohio State has two only difficult games on its schedule: at Iowa and at Wisconsin.
The Other Side

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"Boise State opens Monday night against Virginia Tech in Landover, Md. The only other opponent that has a weight room is Oregon State."
-- David Whitley on why Boise State will reign over Oklahoma in college football this season
The Buckeyes will win both these games and be 12-0 by Nov. 27. At which point the scarlet-and-gray clad Big Ten pantywaists will kick up their pantaloons and watch teams that are better than it play in what has become the de facto national championship, the SEC title game in the first weekend of December.

Clutching their corsets and shrieking with horror, the "mighty" Buckeyes, survivors of minor league football north of the Mason-Dixon line, will prepare for a beating in Glendale, Ariz. The Buckeyes' opponent will be a battle-scarred Alabama team. Not an undefeated Alabama team mind you -- someone in the SEC's regular season will get the upset scalp of the year there -- but a tried and tested team worthy of a championship berth. By that point, Alabama will have already dispatched one Big Ten team with ease, Penn State, survived two brawls with Florida, and gutted out several close wins in the SEC.

Then the Crimson Tide will swagger out to Glendale and put yet another whipping upon Ohio State. Cameras will catch Buckeye fans, ridiculous brown nuts hanging around their necks, crying into their oversized mustaches as "Hang on Sloopy" plays on a slow, maudlin loop. No glittering trophy will travel north to shake off the grime left behind from living in the rust belt.

The SEC's record in BCS title games will rise to 7-0 all-time and the Big Ten will fall to 1*-3 with all three losses by Ohio State to the SEC. (*The asterisk is for the bogus pass interference call that gave the Buckeyes their only title game victory. Seven years later that call is still full of crap.) Change that blown call and the Big Ten would be without a national title since the BCS began. No wonder the Big Ten is so adamant that a playoff is a bad idea.

And how much of an indictment of Big Ten football is it that Ohio State, spectacular crap-out artists that they are, is the only Big Ten team even capable of making it to the big game in 13 years? I know the Buckeyes take a lot of justifiable heat for being consistently overrated, but at least they're capable of getting beat down in a big game. The Big Ten's "demographic problem" as commissioner Jim Delany put it really just boils down to this: his football teams suck from top to bottom.

Those demographics are pretty simple.

Not to pour salt in the wounds of Buckeye fans before the season even kicks off ... screw it, let's pour salt in their wounds. Terrelle Pryor will leave for the NFL, your team will be a national punch line once more, and by the start of the 2011 season the Buckeyes' futility against SEC teams will be entering a 23rd consecutive season. If Ohio State's president Gordon Gee is lucky, perhaps his old school Vanderbilt will agree to a home-and-home.

Surely, the Buckeyes could eke out a split.

If all this seems anti-climactic, it is. Ohio State's schedule is the easiest of the major contenders, so it advances. Alabama is the best team, so it advances. Now, there will be the usual gnashing of the teeth over whether a one-loss Alabama team deserves to get in over an undefeated Boise State, but much to Ohio State's chagrin the voters are going to reward a 12-1 SEC team over an undefeated team from outside a major conference. Probably even from a major conference, too.

In the meantime, let me suggest that SEC fans start raising funds to make sure that Ohio State fans are aware of their team's futility against the SEC. In May of 2009, I started tallying the days since Ohio State had beaten an SEC team. In that column, I suggested a billboard in Covington, Ky. so all the Buckeye fans leaving their state for the South could see a constantly advancing record of their failure.

Right now, that billboard would stand at 8,006 days.

By Jan. 12, 2011, when this billboard should definitely become a reality, it will be 8,140 days and counting. The state of Ohio's own national debt of football futility.

Close my eyes and I can see it now, a huge billboard in northern Kentucky that says, "Welcome to the South, Ohio State fans. We play real football here. Bless your hearts, 8,140 and counting. Y'all come back now."