Sea change

This is The Rivalry. This is The Game.

It's the State Up North. It's Woody and Bo. It's more than football. It's 200 years of antipathy built up between two neighboring states that once fought over the squatting rights to Toledo.

To suggest that it's anything less would be to reject your roots. Blasphemy in its most brazen form. The records aren't supposed to matter. The recent history of the series isn't supposed to matter. What matters is this November, this Saturday, somebody is going to win The Game. And you hope its your side.

That's how it's supposed to be. That's how it was. But even those who believe in the sanctity of the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry with the fervor of a faith-healed tent revivalist have to start wondering where the spice went.

The Buckeyes' 37-7 pummeling of Michigan on Saturday was anticipated. It wasn't supposed to be a game. Ohio State is a top 10 football program one loss in Wisconsin removed from national title contention. Michigan's program has devolved into a one-trick pony, reliant almost solely on whatever magic carpet sophomore quarterback Denard Robinson is capable of weaving.

The win was Ohio State's seventh straight against Michigan, their longest streak in the series, which dates to 1897. Buckeye supporters are quick to point out that it's a lopsided stretch of payback for all the years that the Wolverines swung John Cooper from a noose on the town square.

In Jim Tressel's first six years on the job, when he was matching wits with Lloyd Carr and coming out on top all but one year, it was indeed a reversal of fortune, with Carr playing the role that Cooper had played prior to 2000.

But after Ohio State bested Michigan in a 42-39, No. 1 vs. No. 2 thriller that sent the Buckeyes to the national title game, things started to change. Carr retired a year later and Michigan wooed West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez to Ann Arbor. Rodriguez promptly began an attempt to revitalize the Michigan football program in a way that you could argue is far more suited for Conference USA than the Big Ten.

Rodriguez is trying to pound the square peg of a gimmicky spread offense into the round hole of what has traditionally succeeded in the cold-climate Big Ten: defense, ball control and a good kicking game. Michigan has none of the above.

No coincidence, since Rodriguez took over in Ann Arbor, Ohio State -- along with much of the rest of college football -- has been beating up on the Wolverines. The Buckeyes have torched Michigan by a combined score of 100-24 in the past three matchups.

Even when Michigan was whipping Cooper's Buckeyes around like a rag doll for most of the 1990s, the games were still contests. The largest margin of victory for Michigan over Ohio State during Cooper's tenure was 28 points in 1991. The teams frequently met with bowl implications for both sides.

Now, a 7-5 2010 campaign is an improvement for Michigan, which went 5-7 a year ago. There is nothing for the Wolverines to play for by late November, except the role of spoiler. And against Ohio State's deep, talented squad, that's not enough to force an upset.

Which is why, from the south side of the border, Saturday's game had a very "playing Indiana in mid-October" vibe to it. You show up, you take care of business, you go home. As long as you don't have a colossal brain cramp, you're winning the game. It's just a matter of by how much, and how sharp you look while you're winning.

At some point in the future, if Rodriguez can't make the Wolverines any more competitive than what he's shown in his first three seasons, he'll be fired. And the replacement will assuredly have a background in more traditional Big Ten football. And the Wolverines will rise again.

But even if that happens, it's beginning to look like the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry might be undergoing a permanent redefining. Next year, Ohio State and Michigan will, barring a last-muinute change of heart from the Big Ten front office, be headed to separate divisions.

The game will remain on the calendar as the regular season finale for both teams. But its place on the schedule will be more ceremonial than anything else in the championship-game, Cornhusker-infused Big Ten of 2011 and after.

Gone forever will be the days when the Buckeyes and Wolverines will meet with the conference title on the line. They won't even be able to meet for a division title. Even if they're battling for their respective division titles, The Game might be The Prelude to a Rematch in the Big Ten Championship Game the following week.

The weight of the game will be laregly circumstantial in the coming years. Ohio State's games against division rivals such as Penn State and Wisconsin will have more weight in terms of getting the Buckeyes to the conference title game. Ohio State won't have to worry about a tiebreaker with Michigan.

And this all assumes that Michigan will reclaim its position as a national powerhouse at some point soon, and isn't looking at an extended stay with Purdue and Illinois in the middle of the Big Ten pack.

It will always be The Game. It will always be a border war. But it's not a marquee matchup anymore. And it might never be again -- at least as we've come to know it.

Exploited to perfection

We never saw it coming. Not like this.

Sure, Florida could win. It's not like, in our legendary Northeast Ohio paranoia, that we never entertained the thought of something going horribly wrong and Florida snatching the national championship away.

It's just that we prepared ourselves for something like a Tony Romo botched hold on a game-deciding field goal attempt. We conditioned ourselves for Antonio Pittman to play the role of Earnest Byner on third-and-goal in the fourth quarter.

Forty-one to 14, we couldn't have seen coming. Ted Ginn Jr. getting injured by friendly fire in a touchdown celebration, we couldn't have predicted. The crystal ball didn't show Troy Smith looking like Charlie Frye, overmatched and running scared.

And no clairvoyant could have sensed that Jim Tressel would look like a high school JV coach pitted against Urban Meyer.

Maybe we should have.

With the Buckeye necklaces stuffed back into sock drawers for the winter and the last notes of "Hang On Sloopy" fading from the air, it's time for some 20/20 hindsight.

This 2006 Ohio State team was very good. Perhaps, as some have asserted, the best in school history, which is saying a mouthful. But perhaps they weren't as perfect as we wanted to believe.

This was not an all-time great college football team all along. A lot of what they accomplished, they accomplished with timing first and talent second.

This was a team fortunate enough to not have to face Vince Young when they played Texas. This was a team that cut a wide swath through the Big Ten when the conference was in a down period.

They clobbered Minnesota and Northwestern, but let Illinois scare them and let Penn State hang close until late.

Much like the 2002 Buckeyes, the '06 edition relied on the Houdini qualities of its quarterback and big, talented receivers to create big plays that frequently eliminated the need for long, clock-controlling drives. But the '02 Buckeye offense was backed by a dominant defense that carried the team.

The '06 Buckeye offense, perhaps more talented than their '02 counterparts, had no such luxury.

Say what you will about the stats, about the Buckeyes having one of the stingiest defenses in the nation this year, but the defense wasn't really challenged by a BCS bowl-caliber offense until they faced Michigan. Then, they were exposed.

Michigan proved that a good offense can score against the Buckeye defense. Even though Michigan was well-aided by turnovers in scoring 39 points, Florida coach Urban Meyer probably locked in on footage of the Michigan game when preparing for Ohio State. Whatever he saw, and whatever he taught his team, it worked better than anybody's wildest dreams.

In their last two games of the season, the Ohio State defense surrendered 80 points. Those particular numbers don't lie. When Ohio State's defense was truly challenged, they were exposed as not being national title-worthy.

But if the roster had its shortcomings, it still doesn't explain the egg laid by Tressel, a coach who has gotten deficient teams to play over their heads in the past.

Tressel looked as bad as he's ever looked as the Ohio State coach. Right now, Tressel is, by a sizeable distance, the second-best coach in college football. Meyer simply overmatched Ohio State's accomplished coach. Why that happened is a riddle that might never be solved.

Everything that Tressel normally excels at -- game preparation, mid-game adjustments, keeping his players calm and collected in the heat of battle -- he failed at miserably on Monday night.

Everybody has an off day on the job, and perhaps Tressel just had one at the worst possible time. With superior athleticism at key positions, Florida might have beaten Ohio State had Tressel been on his game. But the fact that Tressel wasn't on his game is the reason Florida won by 27 points.

We seemed to think, heading into the game, that Tressel and his team would have to be caught napping at the wheel to lose this game. ESPN's Lee Corso came right out and said as much. Well, Tressel was napping at the wheel. And Meyer was wide awake, with a faster, hungrier, and in some cases, a more talented team.

You saw the result. If I didn't know better, I'd say that Ohio State, from the coach down, didn't deserve to be the favorite heading into the game. They sure as heck didn't play like anybody's favorite.

Expect the unexpected

By now, Boise State's exploits in the Fiesta Bowl are the stuff of legend.

They rallied on a hook-and-ladder play. They won the game with a two-point conversion, down by a point in overtime. That call took a rare combination of icy resolve, intestinal fortitude and man organs the size of grapefruits.

Give Boise State coach Chris Petersen an "A" for boldness, but not for creativity. He probably saw that play before.

Urban Meyer, then the coach at Bowling Green, ran a similar do-or-die two-point conversion to beat Northwestern in 2001.

Meyer knew his team couldn't stack up talentwise with a Big Ten school, so he pulled out all the stops. In his two seasons at BG, it usually worked. Meyer had a habit of pulling out wins against ostensibly better teams from bigger schools. His BG resume also included wins over Kansas and Missouri.

It's not quite as severe as a MAC school against a BCS conference school, but Meyer knows his current team, the Florida Gators, are the underdog as they face Ohio State tonight for the national title.

A word to the wise, which I count Jim Tressel among: Expect the unexpected. Meyer knows his team can't go blow-for-blow with the powerful and well-balanced Buckeyes, so expect him to use smoke, mirrors and the element of surprise to try and gain the upper hand.

Meyer is quite simply the best offensive head coach in the land. His playbook, chock full of innovative formations, misdirections and other chicanery, would be enough to make a Browns fan weep.

Meyer will likely employ Muhammad Ali tactics tonight. If the Buckeyes come right at the Gators, slugging away, he'll probably instruct his team to rope-a-dope as much as possible, trying to withstand an early barrage of energy from the fired-up Buckeyes. Then, if he can keep the score close and tire the Buckeye defense out, he'll use his team's speed and a few dips into the bag of tricks to try and eke out the win.

If Tressel is wise, he'll instruct his team to leave something in the tank for the fourth quarter. It's the national championship, adrenaline will be flowing on both sides, but a team that is too fired up in the first quarter can be the team that is spent by the fourth quarter.

Meyer is the kind of coach who preys on your fatigue. He isn't trying to wear you out physically so much as mentally. That's when you let your guard down. That's when he can spring something on you.

You might think, in a moment of arrogance, that maybe Florida shouldn't be in Arizona tonight. Maybe USC or Michigan would have made for better competition. But even if you think Florida's roster isn't national title-caliber, their coach most certainly is. That matters more than you might want to believe.