The sure thing

It is official, there is no surer thing when it comes to bowls than this: if Ohio State plays an SEC team in a bowl, it will lose.  After tonight's BCS title game, for which Ohio State was properly the underdog, Ohio State is 0-9 all time against SEC teams in bowl games.

That is astounding.  Worse yet, most of those losses have occurred in the past 17 years since the Big Ten and SEC have had multiple second-tier bowl tie-ins.  Both the former Outback/Gator and Citrus Bowl have had Big Ten/SEC matchups for nearly two decades.  OSU has had more than its share of opportunities to knock off ANY foe from the SEC -- six from those tie-in bowls, and two straight in the "BCS title game" (the 35-6 beating Alabama put on OSU in the 1978 Sugar Bowl doesn't really matter in this diatribe).  Seriously, it is almost an accomplishment to continually bonk.  Compare that to Michigan and Penn State winning a combined 11 of 15 bowls against SEC teams since 1991 (this includes Penn State's pre-Big T[elev]en matchup with Tennessee in the '92 Fiesta Bowl).  Truly strange -- even more so than Notre Dame's glorious nine-bowl losing streak.

This OSU team doesn't deserve any real blame.  Most pundits thought Michigan was the team to beat in the Big T(elev)en this year before the Wolverines honked against a division I-AA team.  OSU won the league, whupped Wisconsin, Penn State and Michigan and bonked on the road against Illinois.  And OSU is relatively young -- only a handful of starters are seniors and the QB is not quite the all-American that Heisman winner Troy Smith was last year.  So it's also to OSU's credit that it played moderately well against a superior team instead of laying a horrible-smelling egg against an equal (at best) like it did in the '06 title game against Florida. Sickeningly enough, Jim Tressel has set up the program to beat in the Big T(elev)en and beating it is rare -- just ask Michigan.  The Monk says that because he thinks the program is shady.

Worse yet, The Monk now has to listen to all the nearby LSU fans chirping about how great this team is and their second national title in five years and blah blah blah.  Disgusting.  And all that would have been avoided if West Virginia could have scored 1/3 as many points against bottom-barrel Pitt as it did in whomping Oklahoma.  Too bad the BCS is so horrendous that it farked up the 2003 title game and didn't have USC put a colossal beating on LSU -- the end result if not for the farcical choice of OU to meet the Tigers in the "title" game -- that would at least brunt the nausea.

So kudos to LSU for sucking marginally less than UGa, WVU, USC, Mizzou and getting more respect than KU.  What a ridiculous way to determine a national "champion."