Austin, Texas – Guess Jim Tressel knows who he’ll vote No. 1 this week.
At least he’d better. I would – if I had a vote. So would you. So would your mother, your father, your golden retriever and anyone else who watched one of the most impressive regular-season performances since, well, Texas won at Ohio State this time last year.
Now if Tressel can just get his vote right. Last week he lauded Texas and gave them his first-place vote in the coaches poll. Turns out, he has nothing to do with it. He has his right-hand man, the director of football operations, do the poll and the flunkie voted for Ohio State without Tressel knowing it.
That tells you how credible this whole college football ranking racket is, but Saturday night’s convincing 24-7 win over second-ranked Texas certainly put some order into the national picture. In what’s considered the most wide-open national race in years, in which six teams received first-place votes last week, Ohio State made the “1” in No. 1 look like an exclamation point.
Forget what No. 4 Notre Dame did to Penn State on Saturday afternoon. Third-ranked Southern Cal’s pillaging of Arkansas in Week 1 seemed like a generation ago. Wrap your buckeye necklace around this: In the biggest football game in the history of this city, in front of the largest crowd to see a football game in this state, top-ranked Ohio State came in against possibly the nation’s best defense and won in just short of a rout.
It’s not easy to make a crowd of 89,442 fans quiet at night in Texas. Ohio State (2-0) managed to do that. In the process, they have emerged in Week 2 as, without question, the best team in college football.
“This is a big, big step,” Tressel said. “I said last week that we took a small step, now we have to take a big one. We took a big one.”
The game had eerie similarities to Texas’ 25-22 win in Columbus last year. Texas quarterback Vince Young came of age, leading a winning fourth-quarter drive. Ohio State quarterback Troy Smith, while having more on-field cred than Young at this point, put himself in the forefront as the country’s next great quarterback.
All he did was hit 17-of-26 passes for 269 yards and two touchdowns and never turned the ball over against a defense that’s considered as good as last year’s national championship team. A year ago, he watched from the sideline after serving a two-game suspension and some wondered if he had played the whole game whether Texas would have won it all. Well, we got a glimpse Saturday.
“Troy has improved every day since he got here, methodically and incrementally,” Tressel said.
Anyone picking Ohio State before the game pointed out the massive gap between the senior Smith and Colt McCoy, the redshirt freshman thrown into Texas’ fire at quarterback. McCoy didn’t lose it. He looked like a future quarterback great, hitting 19-of-32 for 154 yards and a 2-yard TD pass to Billy Pittman to tie it 7-7 in the second quarter.
However, if he spent last year studying Young, he should have spent this week studying Smith, who was poised, strong, fast, accurate. With Texas concentrating on game-breaker Ted Ginn Jr., Smith hit Anthony Gonzalez seven times in the first half for 122 yards and a 14-yard TD pass.
Smith then put Ohio State up for good when Ginn beat Aaron Ross for a 29-yard TD for a 14-7 halftime lead. The noise on Sixth Street on Friday night was louder than Memorial Stadium.
“I tried not to think about last year’s game,” Smith said. “We didn’t come here with a chip on our shoulder…. This is a totally different group of seniors.”
Smith, however, had an advantage Young didn’t have last year. Texas’ secondary was depleted, thanks to cornerback Tarell Brown, its best defensive back, who picked Ohio State Week to get arrested on drug charges. They were dropped, but Texas coach Mack Brown wouldn’t drop his one-game suspension, putting junior Brandon Foster on the hot seat, which burned him all night.
But this wasn’t just about a quarterback who got closer in Brady Quinn’s rearview mirror in the Heisman race. Texas came in as a 2 1/2-point favorite because many figured even McCoy could exploit a Buckeye defense with only two returning starters.
Ohio State gave up 326 yards, but whenever Texas neared the goal line, the Buckeyes morphed into last season’s devastating unit. Saturday marked the first time since last year’s Ohio State game that the Longhorns didn’t score at least 40 points.
Now the Buckeyes must hope that the similarities with last year’s game don’t end with Smith and Young. That victory launched Texas to the national title. Ohio State’s toughest game is at Iowa in three weeks. It gets Penn State and Michigan at home. If they survive those three, Tressel can have his golden retriever do the poll.
John Henderson can be reached at 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
