Ohio State Wins Big; Pat Forde Still Delivers Backhanded Compliment

The Ohio State Buckeyes must feel like Rodney Dangerfield, because they are once again getting "no respect."

The defense played great!

The offense was back!

The Buckeye machine was running on all cylinders in East Lansing Saturday afternoon, to the tune of 45-7.

Most of the media and fans outside of Ohio didn't expect Ohio State to win so convincingly.

Actually, most of them didn't expect Ohio State to win at all.

Many, if not most, of the so-called experts picked Michigan State to pull off the big upset win and end any talk of the Buckeyes making it to a BCS game, or God forbid a third-straight BCS title game.

Pat Forde wrote a story for ESPN.com about Pryor telling Coach Tressel to bench him if he didn't lead the team down the field on the first few drives.

Mostly through the article, Forde recapped how the game played out, and he even seemed to give the Buckeyes, and specifically Pryor, credit for a big win in blowout fashion on the road.

Then, after setting up the dominos, seemingly building up Pryor and the team for a great performance, in typical ESPN, Mark May and Pat Forde fashion, he wrote two little sentences right near the end of his story that knocked them all back down, and I quote:

"Buckeyes fans love wearing jerseys to games, and all of them should come with a chip on the shoulder given the state's wounded reaction to criticism of Ohio State's serial pratfalls in major national games.

First there was Florida, then LSU, then USC—but now, returned to the safe (and slow) harbor of the Big Ten, the Bucks are rolling once more." -- Pat Forde, ESPN.com

You can read the whole story here.

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