Ohio State Has a Lot to Prove

There’s every reason to believe that the Ohio State Buckeyes deserve the No. 1 ranking virtually everyone is pinning on them as the college football season begins in earnest this weekend. Twenty starters return from last year’s team that won 10 games, and the four new starters, including specialists, were big-time reserves last season. The Buckeyes have a quarterback who was No. 3 nationally in pass efficiency last season, a running back who averaged 5.6 yards and rushed for six touchdowns as a part-timer, a wide receiver about to crash Cris Carter’s school career records, and a linebacker whose coaches will tell you is the fastest, fiercest and hardest-hitting at his position to come out of the Big Ten since Dick Butkus.

Ohio State plays all but one of its toughest games at home, including matches with Penn State, Michigan State and Michigan. Coach John Cooper says he’s got more good young players than he’s ever coached in Columbus. And the Buckeyes ought to be properly motivated, still seething over having lost once again to Michigan in the season’s Big Game.

And with all that working in its favor, I’d pick the Buckeyes to finish ...

Anywhere except No. 1.

Ohio State has the same problem Nebraska had a few years ago, the same problem Michigan had going into last season. Failure To Deliver. Too Many Promises Unfulfilled. It’s plagued the Buckeyes for, oh, 30 years. The Buckeyes have got the best team on paper, but this isn’t the first time. They have to show us. If they can go undefeated with that killer schedule (which begins Saturday night at West Virginia), they will have carried the burden of proof, and God bless ‘em. Personally, I’d have to see them beat Michigan and at least make it to the Fiesta Bowl before buying into any of the hype.

This also presumes that linebacker Andy Katzenmoyer will be eligible to play. Big Kat, as he is called in the great Midwest, had to do well enough in his summer school courses-- Golf 1, Music 140 and AIDS: What Every College Student Should Know -- to raise his cumulative GPA to 2.0. I’m serious. Remember this the next time the announcer keeps blathering on and on about these “great student ath-a-letes” during your Saturday broadcast.

Every time one of these academic stories comes up, there’s a rush to blame somebody. But if Golf 1 is offered to the student body at large, you can’t blame Katzenmoyer for taking it. I’ll bet he isn’t the only kid in the class. Does it say something about Ohio State? Maybe, maybe not. I remember taking “Physics of Music” at Northwestern, the hoity toity school of the conference, and having it count toward my math/science requirement. We called these courses Micks, short for “Mickey Mouse” classes, the easiest to pass. The question for anybody at any school, ultimately, is how many Micks can you have and still earn a respectable degree? And do jocks like Big Kat have a disproportionate share?

On some level, Katzenmoyer is using Ohio State in about the same way the university is using him. The school is making millions off him while he’s making the school allow him to major in football.

That deal may have gone to his head. He was quoted as saying in Sports Illustrated, “Every 10 or 15 years, a new breed of athlete comes along; bigger, faster, stronger. I see myself as a new breed.”

The last time a linebacker from middle America was so full of himself, I think, was Brian Bosworth. Remember him? I didn’t think so. A dozen years ago Bosworth thought he was a new breed and that lasted until Bo Jackson took his head off on “Monday Night Football” and the next thing you know, ol’ Boz was hugging the seat of a motorcycle in B movies. Hey, Big Kat may be the real deal. But having grown up in the Midwest and having attended a Big Ten school, I can tell you with some certainty that overhyped Midwestern linebackers are like overhyped point guards from New York City. Big Kat had a kitty-kat total of two sacks last season. Let this kid run down a running back or two from Florida State or Florida in January and I’ll tip my hat to him. I hope the kid is eligible, so we can see what he’s got. With that curriculum, he’d better be.

With Big Kat, Ohio State ought to be in there slugging it out for No. 1. But I’d take Florida State, Florida and Nebraska ahead of the Buckeyes, and I’m tempted to put Kansas State and UCLA ahead of them, too.

The problem for K-State and their talented quarterback, Michael Bishop, is that the Wildcats have got to beat Nebraska at some point. This is probably the year to do it, though, since the game is in Manhattan and since the Huskers have eight new starters on offense, including quarterback Bobby Newcombe, who has completed one pass in his career, and -- oh! -- a new coach in Frank Solich, who wisely answers more than a few questions with the phrase, “We’ll do what Tom (Osborne) did.”

It’s silly to pay attention to how many people the Seminoles and Gators lose, because they keep replacing the guys who left with players who are just as good or better.

Though Ryan Leaf and Peyton Manning have gone, it’s not a bad year for quarterbacks, beginning right here with Howard’s Ted White and moving around the country from K-State (Bishop) to UCLA (Cade McNown) to Arizona State (Ryan Kealy) to Syracuse (Donovan McNabb) to Washington (Brock Huard) to Mizzou (Corby Jones) to Central Florida (Daunte Culpepper) to Ohio State’s Joe Germaine, who will begin in the spotlight that he’d gladly share with a Big Kat waiting to find out if lessons learned will allow him to pounce.