Ha-ha! Listen to this idiot. Boy, this guy must feel like a total jackass:

Thus, with a win in Ann Arbor, this theoretical Ohio State team finishes the season at 8-4. The Outback bowl, and a chance to redeem the season (and in some small ways, the program) with a New Year's Day victory over an SEC squad, both beckon. Keep in mind this is the worst case scenario*, but that even with Pryor injured, I still think Ohio State ends up in a bowl. The Motor City bowl, perhaps? Who knows. I'd rather not think about it.

Of course, the Motor City Bowl is now the even-more-humiliatingly-titled Pizza Bowl, and, after an expected loss to USC and a shocking fall to Purdue, Ohio State stands at 7-2. With games at Penn State and against a top-5 Iowa squad looming, 8-4 is a very real possibility. Having seen the depths this team can reach at Purdue, I also feel very confident in saying that 8-4 is far, far from what could have been a genuine worst-case scenario. Still, that provides little solace to a fanbase that has been clamoring for changes for a few years now, and that's wholly understanble.

I bring this up because, up to this point, I haven't considered 2009 any sort of massive disappointment on the whole. Have you? In my mind, I expected 9-3, 10-2 at the most, but I never for a second convinced myself that I should be OUTRAGED if the Buckeyes somehow fall short of either record. Personally, that's just how I root. My philosophy regarding sports fandom is relatively simple: if at any point, the net gains in happiness your team provides you are outweighed by net losses in happiness, sanity, whatever, then for your own good, you just have to divorce yourself of your passions. I personally believe that the outcome of a game between 18-22 year old kids should only affect your emotions for a few hours, perhaps a day at the most, but no more than that. This has been decried by many as emblematic of a lack of passion. Personally, I'd just rather not consign myself to forcing my mood to reflect the state of my football team. I think most relatively-sane people would agree that this is a reasonable principle to live by.

I suppose I should first delineate between what I mean by "disappointment" and what I mean by "frustration". I think disappointment is inevitable for many Buckeye fans, if only because many of them are conditioned to believe that any year in which Ohio State is not noticeably nationally relevant (i.e. in the BCS top 8) for the entire year is an unmitigated failure. I, like Jim Tressel, feel sorry for these folks, because they just aren't going to be happy very often (though, technically, they should be fine and dandy given the frequency with which we make BCS bowls, but that's another story). These people especially won't be happy watching a team that has spent much of the year with just three starting seniors (all on defense) work out the kinks. I know these people, but I'll never even begin to understand them, so I don't bother with trying to convince them anymore. They're not going away. There will always be, for lack of a better term, idiots.

But "frustration" is an entirely different concept. I think there are very few fans in America who aren't at least a little frustrated with some aspect of their team, in every sport. Some call it "nitpicking"; I'm thankful we're at least given something to discuss. If everything is hunky-dory, I'm out a job. Frustration itself is just a small part of fandom. There's always something that you think needs work, and in the case of this particular Buckeye football team, a whole lot needs work. Yes, we can attempt to restrict our frustration to the offense, but the defense too has had its lapses in giving up key drives and scores (though, if we're honest with ourselves, we realize the offense's ineffectiveness has quite a bit to do with that). But in a strict sense, defensive breakdowns are relatively infrequent compared to those of the offense's, which are laid bare for all to see in basically every game This year has been - and I don't think anyone will argue with this - a frusrating one for Buckeye fans. I can hear Michigan fans screaming at the top at the top of their lungs: "you don't know frustration yet", and they may be right. Fact is, as good as this Ohio State offense looks in fits and starts against bad teams, it looks bad to about the same degree against almost every other team, and far more frequently.  There are just a lot of things that aren't clicking, and it seems like most of them should be by this final three game stretch. That's what is frustrating. I hesitate to say the unit is not progressing, as I think the rushing attack has improved, I think Pryor's mechanics are improving in subtle ways, but I'm not sure these particular improvements completely mask the other deficiencies. Personally, it's shocking to me that Ohio freaking State has one 100-yard performance from a running back at this point in the year.

Which goes back to why I made that prediction in the first place: obviously, I based that prediction on a core set of assumptions, and one of those assumptions is that  "We're Ohio State; we run the ball well, even if it's all we do well." Sounds pretentious, even arrogant. It was.

There are numerous things on which we may place the blame for this offense: the offensive line, the backs, Jim Bollman's very existence... the list goes on. At times, it seems like Brandon Saine wouldn't see the Red Sea parting before his eyes, and Daniel Herron has been banged up for most of the year. Now, these last few games, the attack seems to have come alive, but these two performances came against the 89th- and 107th-ranked rushing defenses. Against Purdue, the country's 88th best rush D, the Buckeyes came away with mostly nothing. Now, most of that can be explained away by Ohio State inexplicably abandoning the run after Purdue showed signs of life, but holes that should have been there, at least in the early going for Brandon Saine, frequently weren't. That is, for lack of a better term, ridiculous. What use is a "power running" team that can't run the damn ball? Two tights, between the tackles is our bread-and-butter folks, whether we want to admit it or not. It's what we do, and until this year and outside of 2004, we did it unlike almost anyone else in the country. The inability to establish a consistent ground game has shaken the offense as a whole to its core, and has put a lot of unnecessary weight on Terrelle Pryor's shoulders.

Is the year as a whole disappointing? No, not yet, and I don't think it realistically can be considered one if Ohio State wins two out of three down the stretch. But there are undeniably aspects of this team that are wholly frustrating in and of themselves. The running game is not just a part of it, but the biggest part. The most worrisome thing to me is that I can't think of a reason for this attack to struggle. Brandon Saine is not chopped liver, Boom Herron was big-time in limited time last year, and the freshmen are clearly quite talented. This might be the deepest set of backs Jim Tressel has coached. Up front, Justin Boren and Michael Brewster are solid, but not dominant. Browning is a far better guard than he was a tackle. So what the hell's wrong? Is it horses, or is it something endemic in the scheme? Not being a coach, I don't have the answers. I've previously stated that I still have faith in Tressel to put things together by the end of the year, as he always does, and I still do. But it's looking like it'll take one of the bigger miracles of his career to get the ground game up to speed to win both at Penn State and against Iowa.