Dr. Saturday has assembled their latest takedown of Ohio State’s performance against Southern Cal, and it is as impressively executed as it is empirically damning of the state of the Jim Tressel regime at Ohio State. For the second time in as many years, The 105,000+ that packed Ohio Stadium last Saturday were betrayed by Tressel’s predictable game-planning and his steadfast refusal to let Terrelle Pryor play like the quarterbacking phenom we all knew he was going to be.

Pryor was not coached to make a bootleg fake at all. Instead, he would hand the ball off to the running back and, as if he was Dan Marino, stand there and watch the play. How insane is that? You take your most talented runner, and ask him to hand it off and then stand there to ensure that the defense knows it need not worry about him? And not worry about him they did; OSU’s power plays were overwhelmed with Trojan defenders. The bootleg fake is one of the keys to making the power stuff go; that’s why the zone-read stuff was invented, to better control that backside defender. Quarterbacks from Fran Tarkenton to Joe Montana — guys with sensible coaching — paved the way for this for years. via.

It’s hard to dump on a guy with five national championships in Division I, until you realize that his team simply gave away a game that could have put them at No. 2 in the polls and, ergo, a fourth BCS title game (de facto or otherwise) in seven years. With Michigan and Tate Forcier rolling after beating Notre Dame last week, Tressel will have to start pulling rabbits out of his ass if he expects to win in Ann Arbor this year. And not those conservative, Power-I running rabbits, either.