My former co-worker with some thoughts on the Buckeyes

I promise this will eventually tie back to Ohio State.

In the meantime, no one out there will care about this except me. Guess what? That's why it's called 'Level 6 Sports' and not 'Douchebag Avenue'. Although I'm sure there are some that think the latter is more apropos.

Anyway, turns out a guy I used to work with at the Sycamore Public Library in suburban Cincinnati back in high school worked his way up the ladder and is now the senior college football writer for Sports Illustrated's website. Stewart Mandel went to Sycamore High School, thus the 'Aviators' helmet pictured to the right.

Stewart also wrote Bowls, Polls, and Tattered Souls which will be released on paperback August 18th. The book gives a comprehensive look at the current state of college football and how we got here.

Stewart isn't the only Sycamore Public Library alum to go onto bigger things that would garner much attention.

Another one of my former co-workers, Malar Balasubramanian, also graduated from Sycamore High, went to Case Western, became a doctor, then murdered her own mother with her bare hands. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison in January 2006 after pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter.

Unfortunately that is a true story.

And then of course, there's me. I'm...doing this.

Back to Stewart though, he runs a weekly mailbag that I always find interesting and objective. I can honestly say that's not because I once knew the guy. I actually read his stuff for at least a year before I realized that he and the Stewart Mandel from Cincinnati were one in the same.

Enough memory lane though, here's the meat.

I don't know if it's because Stewart Mandel went to Northwestern and thus has some allegiances to the Big Ten or what. He always seems to have a level head when it comes to Ohio State. You can check out the rest of this week's mailbag here, but this is by far the most interesting entry (the one concerning OSU).


Mr. Mandel: In 2001, the "computers" sent Nebraska to the Rose Bowl to play Miami for the national championship. For the most part, the media was outraged by the egregious miscalculation and demanded the computers be reduced in importance or eliminated altogether. Eventually, the BCS listened. So, here we are several years later and how has the media responded to their newly acquired relevance? By choosing Ohio State not once but two years in a row to go get spanked in the championship game. It was clear, even up here in Alaska, that Ohio State was just as outmatched in the last two championships as Nebraska was in 2001. So where is the outrage?
-- Mike, Juneau, Alaska

You know, it recently occurred to me that I could probably include an Ohio State backlash-related query in every single Mailbag, were I so inclined. In fact, I could probably run an entire Mailbag devoted exclusively to the topic, that's how many of these type of e-mails I receive.

A point-by-point rebuttal to Mike's e-mail:

1) In both the Nebraska season you're referring to, as well as with Oklahoma two years later, the computers elevated a team to the BCS title game that had been both destroyed in its final regular-season game (Nebraska 62-36 to Colorado, Oklahoma 35-7 to Kansas State) and failed to win its own conference's title. Hence, the uproar over the computers.

2) Two years ago, when Ohio State got clobbered by Florida, the Buckeyes had gone 12-0 in the regular season. They had beaten the defending national champion (Texas) on the road and beaten an 11-0 opponent (Michigan) in their final game. While it's easy to look back now and claim that the Buckeyes were an "unworthy" choice, a) I don't agree, and b) I don't remember hearing even the slightest peep along those lines prior to the game.

3) While there's certainly a better case to be made that Ohio State was not a deserving participant last year, I fail to see how its 38-24 loss to LSU was anywhere remotely as galling as that Miami-Nebraska game, in which the Huskers trailed 34-0 at halftime. The 2000 Oklahoma-Florida State game, in which the Seminoles' only points came on a safety, was far more one-sided as well. Want to take a guess how FSU got into that one?

4) Finally, if we had in fact gone with the computers' top two teams last season, do you know what the national-title matchup would have been? LSU vs. Virginia Tech. That's right -- a rematch of a regular-season game in which the score was 48-7. Given the choice, I think I'll take the Ohio State backlash over what that one would have caused.