Revenge in Evanston

Ohio State 54, Northwestern 10

The Ohio State Buckeyes ran their record to 11-0 today with a 54-10 thrashing of Northwestern Wildcats. It was a very convincing win for the Buckeyes, who posted 21 first quarter points to KO the Wildcats early. The Buckeyes took advantage of 3 early Northwestern turnovers by turning them into 21 easy points, which quickly negated any sort of late season upset that Northwestern might have envisioned.

Highlights of the game belong to, well, everybody. Buckeye quarterback and Heisman Trophy candidate Troy Smith had another nice day, turning in 4 touchdown passes on a 12 of 19 passing performance. Smith passed for 185 yards but also threw one interception on the afternoon, which raises his season total to FOUR for the year.
The Buckeye ground game shook Ryan Field this afternoon. Freshman running back Chris Wells had 98 yards on 11 carries, which included a touchdown plunge from 2 yards out. More importantly, is that the young back from Akron did not fumble and ran with authority today. Antonio Pittman became the 5th running back in Buckeye history to rush for over 1,000 yards in back-to-back seasons. Pittman's 82 yards on 19 carries included one touchdown, and also put him into the record books with Archie Griffin, Tim Spencer, Keith Byars, and Eddie George.
The defense once again played extremely well this afternoon. It was one of those "pick your defensive highlight for the day" afternoons for the Buckeye D, which was highlighted by a 46 yard Brandon Mitchell interception return for a touchdown in the 2nd quarter. Other defensive highlights included an early first quarter forced fumble by sophomore James Laurinaitis (recovered by Antonio Smith) and freshman linebacker Ross Homan's first career pick. The play that I was superbly impressed by occurred in the second quarter. It was a wide receiver screen that Bacher tossed to his left, and Malcolm Jenkins was all over it. Jenkins shed the lineman that was blocking for the WR, and then managed to strip the ball and recover his own fumble. An awesome play by the Buckeyes best corner, and I cannot believe this kid is only a sophomore. It will be a heck of a matchup between he and Mario Manningham next week.
There were a couple of very minor miscues today that probably should be mentioned. Antonio Pittman did fumble on the Northwestern one yard line, and OSU did have a couple of errors on two extra point attempts (one blocked, one bad snap). Today was a good time for those to happen, primarily just to remind Ohio State how important ball security is and to work on PAT's this week in practice even more.

HOW TO BEAT MICHIGAN will come this week, probably by Wednesday afternoon. If Coach Tressel emails or calls me this week and doesn't want me to disseminate this critical information on how to beat Michigan on Saturday, that would be the only reason I would not post this information for you. However, Coach Tressel, my silence will cost your two tickets to this weekend's game if you'd like to purchase my silence. Love ya JPT.
More Michigan stuff all this week. GO BUCKS.....bds