Game Thread BCS National Championship Game: tOSU 24, LSU 38 (final)

[osugrad21]

Canton

Repository experts pick Ohio State
Monday, January 7, 2008


Don Detore

It was some consolation to know that the coach who beat Ohio State last year, Urban Meyer, hailed from Ohio (my hometown of Ashtabula, to be exact). No such luck for the dastardly SEC representative this year. Instead, they are led by a Michigan graduate Les Miles who .... uh, never mind ... hails from Ohio (Elyria). Anyway, Go Bucks. Ohio State 24-14

Joe Frollo

They have the running game, the defense and the chips on their shoulders. The only problem is: As the game has gotten closer, the national ?experts? have slowly slid toward the Buckeyes? camp. Ohio State, 31-27

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[osugrad21]

Canton

How Ohio State, LSU match up
Monday, January 7, 2008
By Todd Porter
REPOSITORY SPORTS WRITER

OFFENSIVE LINE

OSU This is the story of the game: Ohio State?s offensive line is looking for redemption after Florida?s faster defensive front embarrassed the Buckeyes last year. Tackles Kirk Barton and Alex Boone had arguably their worst games of that season. But both have been steady since. Boone, at left tackle, is a key. When he plays well, Ohio State wins. The only game Boone performed poorly in this year was Illinois. He rebounded against Michigan. Look for Boone to play well. Jim Cordle at center, Steve Rehring at left guard and Ben Person at right guard will have their hands full with LSU?s Glenn Dorsey. At 6-2, 303, Dorsey moves better than his weight would indicate. Person will see plenty of Dorsey and OSU will have to double-team him.

LSU LSU didn?t get to have the nation?s 12th-best rushing offense because it couldn?t block. LT Herman Jackson was a first-team All-SEC coaches pick. Ciron Black is only a sophomore but he has 26 straight starts. Lyle Hitt may be the most consistent performer. He had 58 knockdown blocks this season.

ADVANTAGE BUCKEYES


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[osugrad21]

Canton

Victory would silence Tressel's critics
Monday, January 7, 2008
BY Todd Porter
REPOSITORY SPORTS WRITER

NEW ORLEANS

Like the beads that rain from the balconies on Bourbon Street, Jim Tressel is leaving New Orleans on Tuesday with a reputation ? deserved or not ? tied to his neck.

The Ohio State head coach, regardless of whether he agrees, will leave the Superdome tonight with the pre-eminent college football program, or one that?s overrated and over-hyped after losing consecutive national title games.

Reputations are earned in times like these. Ohio State certainly is among the elite in college football, not a statement that could have been made a decade ago. Tressel and the Buckeyes are victims of their own success.

Tonight?s BCS National Championship Game will be the third in six years for Tressel. The Buckeyes have finished in the top five in the BCS rankings in five of the last six years.


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[osugrad21]

Canton

Who are these Buckeyes? This OSU team lacks star power
Monday, January 7, 2008
By Todd Porter
REPOSITORY SPORTS WRITER

NEW ORLEANS They had an identity, they had hype, they had a Heisman Trophy winner and they had stars. Still, none of it won Ohio State a national title a year ago.

Tonight, when Ohio State lines up against LSU in the BCS National Championship Game, what the Buckeyes have is anonymity.

Outside of a few players, it?s a good thing the Buckeyes have their names on the back of their jerseys.

?Last year, everyone was like, ?Man, you guys are going to win. You guys got Troy (Smith), you got Teddy (Ginn Jr.) and Gonzo (Anthony Gonzalez). You have all these superstars, you can?t lose,? ? offensive tackle Alex Boone said.

?This year, it?s like ?Now, who do you have? You have Beanie (Chris Wells) and James (Laurinaitis). That?s great, but who else?? ?

The Buckeyes have embraced what they are: Blue collar. No flash. No glitz. And most of all, no credit.

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[osugrad21]

Canton

Superdome is symbol of New Orleans' recovery
Monday, January 7, 2008
By JOSH WEIR
REPOSITORY SPORTS WRITER

NEW ORLEANS Imagine a man standing in the Ninth Ward. He?s where his home used to be.

Now? That house is a weathered shell. Paint peels. Wood rots.

That same man turns around and looks to downtown New Orleans. Maybe he sees the massive Superdome, with its new white roof, rebuilt with federal money after Hurricane Katrina hit and flooded the area Aug. 29, 2005.

Built on tourism and below sea level, the Big Easy needs the Superdome as it tries to work back from one of the worst natural disasters in United States history.

Welcome to New Orleans, a city of cooperation and contradiction, where U-turns are fittingly legal. Ohio State faces LSU tonight in the Superdome for the BCS college football national championship.


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[osugrad21]

Canton

Tale of the tape: Ohio State vs. LSU
Monday, January 7, 2008
BY JOSH WEIR
REPOSITORY SPORTS WRITER

Take a break from Mark May and Lou Holtz yelling at each other on ESPN and take a different look at tonight?s BCS National Championship Game between Ohio State and LSU at the Superdome in New Orleans.

Here?s a tale-of-the-tape comparison of the Bucks and Bayou Bengals, both on and off the field.

LSU boasts Bill Conti, the creator of the ?Rocky? theme music, and legendary hoopster Pete Maravich as alumni. Advantage, LSU. Tiger Stadium is nicknamed Death Valley. Again, advantage LSU.

But what about Ohio State?s seven national championships, seven Heisman winners, 32 conference titles, etc.?

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[osugrad21]

Blade

Article published Monday, January 7, 2008
BATTLE ON THE BAYOU
Buckeyes will rely on run game, defense tonight against LSU

By MATT MARKEY
BLADE SPORTS WRITER

NEW ORLEANS - They have examined each other's training habits, recorded the historical tendencies and logged the previous bowl-game performances snap-by-snap, looking for that peek inside the psyche. They have reviewed the video from each game this season with the same pain-staking attention to detail that the FBI used when combing through the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. They have used computer programs to calculate the probability of a pass versus the likelihood of a running play. Ohio State and LSU have spent more than a month looking at each other's DNA, and now that they finally get to play in tonight's BCS national championship game, both sides acknowledge that the outcome could likely hinge on something a lot simpler than all of this.

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[osugrad21]

Cincy

OSU seeks redemption
BY JOHN ERARDI | [email protected]

NEW ORLEANS - Tonight against Louisiana State, the Ohio State Buckeyes seek to win a football championship and, in the process, expunge their long national nightmare of having been humiliated by Florida in last year's title game.
Five days of press conferences here have yielded five days of the same questions: What happened? What are you going to do differently?
"After that tough loss (last year), we don't want to have that feeling again," conceded OSU quarterback Todd Boeckman.

But what he didn't divulge - what nobody on OSU has divulged - is exactly what OSU might do differently tonight.
The likelihood is that the nation's football fans will find out just how creative OSU coach Jim Tressel can be.
The Buckeyes want to avoid laying another egg like last year's.
What was to have been a coronation last year for the Buckeyes following an undefeated regular season, quickly deteriorated into a 41-14 abomination.



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[osugrad21]

Cincy

Jan 6, 10:23 PM EST


Buckeyes, Tigers Set for BCS Title Game
By RALPH D. RUSSO
AP College Football Write

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Redemption and validation. Top-ranked Ohio State enters the BCS national championship game against LSU searching for redemption, hoping to bury the memories of an embarrassing loss in last year's title game.
"As much as you try to forget about it, there's no way of forgetting about it," Ohio State fullback Dionte Johnson said. "I can close my eyes and go through that game like I'm still there."
The second-ranked Tigers come into Monday night's showdown at the Superdome looking for validation, trying to prove they were indeed the team most deserving of a chance to play the Buckeyes for the title.
"I really feel it was our destiny to be here," LSU receiver Early Doucet said. "For things to go the way they went - us losing to Arkansas, Pittsburgh beating West Virginia and Oklahoma beating Missouri - it all fell into place the way it did and I just think it was meant to be."
That's a good theory. How else to explain how two teams that lost their second-to-last games are playing for the national championship?
The winner will become the first school to win two BCS titles since the Bowl Championship Series began in 1998. The Buckeyes won it in 2002, then lost 41-14 to Florida as a prohibitive favorite in last year's championship game.



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[osugrad21]

Lima

OSU seeks redemption

Jim Naveau | [email protected] - 01.07.2008

[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]NEW ORLEANS ? If college football coaches are the superstitious sort, chances are good that Ohio State?s Jim Tressel will be getting lots of invitations from other coaches to get together and talk football this spring.
It?s an annual rite of the college game that coaches send their staff to another school for a few days to observe how things are done there, to pick that staff?s brains and to maybe get a fresh idea of how to do things.
Last spring, Ohio State?s coaches visited LSU. Tonight the Buckeyes will play the Tigers in the BCS national championship game in the Superdome (8:22 p.m. EST, FOX).
A year ago, Ohio State?s coaches visited Florida and the Gators saw the Buckeyes again in the BCS title game.
History repeated itself in that matter. But history repeating itself is the last thing Ohio State wants to see in tonight?s game.
The burnt ash of the volcanic eruption of Florida?s 41-14 win in last year?s BCS title game still clings to the Buckeyes.

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[osugrad21]

Lima

Can you say crazy and wacky one more time?

Jim Naveau | [email protected] - 01.07.2008

[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]NEW ORLEANS ? LSU?s football team was flying home from the Southeastern Conference championship game on Dec. 1 with two other games on their minds.
Unlike Ohio State, which just needed either Missouri or West Virginia to lose on the night of Dec. 1, the Tigers had to have both of the two top-ranked teams to fall to get to the BCS national championship game.
The pilot of the plane got confirmation that Pittsburgh had stunned No. 2 West Virginia. But he couldn?t get a definite answer about No. 1 Missouri.
?He said he thought they lost. He said they were usually right on the ground, but he wasn?t sure about this one,? LSU running back Jacob Hester said.
So the Tigers flew on for a few more minutes, thinking anything could happen before one more twist and turn in a crazy college football season put them into the national title game.
It was sort of like the entire college football season. Unpredictable and crazy.
Maybe it?s appropriate that tonight?s matchup of No. 1 Ohio State against No. 2 LSU in the BCS national championship game feels the same way.

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[osugrad21]

MJ

Game may rest in Boeckman's hands
JASON LLOYD, Morning Journal Writer
01/07/2008




NEW ORLEANS -- Todd Boeckman played a large role in Ohio State's 10-0 start, then he was disastrous in the final two games of the season.


With LSU's stout run defense looming in front of Beanie Wells, Boeckman's play will go a long way in determining Ohio State's fate tonight.

''I think the most important thing to give a quarterback a chance to succeed is protection. That's the key,'' OSU coach Jim Tressel said. ''I think if you look at any ball game where a guy makes poor decisions, sometimes it's maybe because he was rushed, maybe there was someone in his face. Maybe he didn't have quite the extra instant to make the best decision.''

That was certainly true of Troy Smith last year in the championship game against Florida. Smith was under constant duress from the Gators, finishing an anemic 4-of-14 for 35 yards and an interception.


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[osugrad21]

MJ

Buckeyes have a great chance to silence critics
JASON LLOYD, Morning Journal Writer
01/07/2008




NEW ORLEANS -- The artists are in position and the paint is ready. In just a few hours, we'll know the fate of Ohio State's future.


Should the Buckeyes beat LSU tonight, all the criticisms of their weak schedule and last year's collapse will quickly fade away. They will be a team that has played for a national championship three times in the last six years and won two of them, something only USC can match.

But should they lose, should the Buckeyes fall in the championship game again, they will be painted as frauds, ''exposed'' as a team that didn't deserve to be here in the first place.

They've beaten one team ranked in the final Top 25, they played three in-state opponents and they lost at home to Illinois, a team that was unranked at the time and ultimately was throttled in the Rose Bowl against USC.

A loss by Ohio State again makes the Big Ten 0-2 in its two biggest bowl games, just like last year.


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[osugrad21]

MJ

More than just Doucet
JASON LLOYD, Morning Journal Writer
01/07/2008




NEW ORLEANS -- Ohio State's defensive scheme against Florida last year was to play a deep zone and keep the Gators receivers in front of them. Florida dinked and dunked its way down the field repeatedly in the first half, putting up 34 points in what became a historic rout.


Now one year later, Ohio State is again facing an SEC team with plenty of speed at receiver. Like Florida, the Tigers don't have any receivers with staggering statistics.

Instead, they have four receivers with at least 25 catches, five who have caught at least three touchdowns and three with over 500 receiving yards.

''They have a bunch of people they can go to,'' safety Kurt Coleman said. ''Florida was more Percy Harvin-oriented. LSU can go to anyone at any time.''

Injuries forced Early Doucet to miss a bulk of the season, but he still finished with a team-high 50 catches. More importantly, his time off the field allowed Brandon LaFell and Demetrius Byrd to develop into viable threats.

LaFell finished the regular season with a team-high 641 receiving yards, while Byrd had a team-high of seven touchdown catches.

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[osugrad21]

Dispatch

Buckeye Bash too big for just one Jim Tressel

Monday, January 7, 2008 3:15 AM
By Tom Reed


The Columbus Dispatch

RENEE SAUER | DISPATCH
Sue Keeton and Shane Carr, both of Columbus, snap a photo of themselves at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans as the Buckeye Bash gets under way. Yesterday's event drew 15,000 people.

CHRIS RUSSELL | DISPATCH
Jim Tressel look-alike Dennis Singleton enjoys the OSU Alumni Association pep rally.


NEW ORLEANS -- The gray-haired gentleman wearing a familiar white collared shirt and red sweater vest walked through the crowd of curious Buckeyes fans. Heads turned. Cameras flashed. Scarlet-clad young ladies, attending yesterday's Buckeye Bash, asked Cathy Singleton for permission to pose with her husband.
"You know, I really wanted to marry a man who looked like George Clooney," Singleton said.



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