All here agree that the tOSU offense made improvements from the UT game and your bowl game, every Div. 1 school in the U.S.A. and Canada can make that claim. To the SAME degree that an offense can improve, the same hold's true for the defense. Gene Chizik will have the majority of his MNC starting defense returning with a whole full year, and spring and fall practices to master his defensive schems. Your predicting that your offense will play better in 2006, well GREAT, it will do so against an improved defense that STATISTICALLY is better than your offsense. Your trying to prove something you don't have the number's for and it can't be done. You act like tOSU is the only team in college that made adjustment's on both side's of the ball, well guess what, UT improved every single game last year aside from the Ok. State game where they relaxed.
How many Div-1 Canadian schools are there?
No Defensive statistics for 2006 have yet been written, so your contention that they are statistically better than anyone is presently baseless - yet you assert this as a numerically provable fact. That it is not, it is simply your belief.
You even have the gall to say that Buckeye fans don't have the numbers to back up what we believe, guess what, neither do you.
This raises one question in my mind - Have you begun hitting the bottle early UTMNC?
No-one ever suggested that Ohio State was the only team to make adjustments on either side of the ball, either from season to season (due to personnel changes) or throughout a season, so that is a complete straw-man.
campies - generally a good case you make there. Though, I think it is weakened somewhat when you rely on
"and other offensive weapons in place for a justified #1 ranking, provided our freshmen quarterbacks can play to an above-average, exceptional level, even if that level is not elite"
which leads to your conclusion that
"Since that's an unknown, you can't bank on it with any sense of certainty, but you CAN take it on good faith that that its {Texas being #1 again}
a strong possibility given the nature of this team and the talent of these players."
As indicated by the pre-season rankings, Texas has a lot of richly-deserved respect, and, I do agree that the general theme of the early season will be a weeding out of the sheep from the goats - some contenders will be shown to be pretenders before November arrives.