Ohio State Football: Inside Urban Meyer's State of the Union Address to Team

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Every year, somewhere between the end the nonconference slate and the start of the league schedule, Urban Meyer delivers a state of the union address to his team. And more times than not, it includes discussion of the national title hunt.

This year was no exception, with the Ohio State head coach opting for the Buckeyes' second bye week in the past month to deviate from his typical opponent-at-hand approach. And while Meyer insists that this year's talk was a short one, his message was unmistakable.

All of Ohio State's goals—national championship included—remain on the table.

"I just show the rankings and show the teams, because they are going to hear it," Meyer told reporters on Wednesday. "When you look at it, everything is wide-open. In college football, this is a pretty open year.”

Meyer is not wrong, and a big part of that has to do with last weekend, which saw five of the top eight teams in the AP Top 25 and 11 ranked squads overall suffer losses. "They called it the strangest week ever—or whatever," Meyer said.

As a result, the Buckeyes jumped five spots in the AP Top 25, where they now sit at No. 15 after dropping to as low as 23rd following their Sept. 6 loss to Virginia Tech. Since its defeat at the hands of the Hokies, Ohio State has reeled off three consecutive wins and again appears to be on a collision course with 4-1 Michigan State for a de facto Big Ten East Division title game in East Lansing on Nov. 8.

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And while there's no telling how the first-ever College Football Playoff committee would view a potential one-loss Big Ten champion, Meyer insists that's not the type of thing that the Buckeyes are focusing on anyways.

“We’re not really clinging to it," Meyer said. "But we’ve got a team that sees itself getting better. They’re much more confident in the way that they’re playing. They have a lot of confidence in our quarterback and skill players, and they’re seeing the defense be what it’s supposed to be right now."

Those ingredients have gone hand in hand with the winning recipe that has led to Ohio State's reinsertion into the playoff picture, which is already as messy as anyone could have imagined it would be at this point in the season.

But while the emergence of redshirt freshman quarterback J.T. Barrett and an apparently improving defense have put the Buckeyes in a more preferable position than they were in a month ago, Meyer admitted to being worried about OSU's second week off in the past four weeks. That, and not a potential playoff run, is the third-year Buckeyes head coach's top concern, as his team gears up for a crucial three-game stretch before its highly anticipated showdown with the Spartans.

"I don’t think these kids care," Meyer said of where Ohio State stands nationally. "I’m hoping they just want to get better. The thing we’re most concerned about is we had momentum and it’s been taken away, so we’ve got to keep that momentum somehow.”

In talking to the Buckeyes players, it became clear that Meyer's message to the media and his team were one and the same. In the span of two questions, center Jacoby Boren used the phrase "we can only control what we can control" three separate times, which is indicative of the mindset that Meyer has attempted to instill in his team.

"Stuff got pretty crazy last weekend," Boren said. "But I think our attitude is we just try to go out and get better every week. We can only control what we can control. We’re going to go out and try to win every game...win a Big Ten championship. After that we’ll see how things stack up, and hopefully they work out for us.

"But we can only control what we can control.”

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That doesn't mean, however, that the Buckeyes haven't found themselves as bigger fans of certain teams in recent weeks. After all, Ohio State knows that it could still use some help in order to ultimately end up as one of the four teams chosen to participate in the first College Football Playoff.

“I would think we’d be kind of stupid not to," Boren said. "No doubt we want to have aspirations of doing big things. But if you see [a team] lose, you’re like, ‘OK, it’s good for us,’ but if we lose, it means nothing. So all we can do is keep winning every week and hopefully keep building on that, and we’ll go good places.”

Which gets to the core of why Meyer opted to acknowledge the Buckeyes' situation in the first place. And although the conversation may have been brief, it could ultimately be crucial when it comes to how Ohio State proceeds into the heart of its 2014 season.

“We had I’d say a five-minute discussion, because I know they’re going to hear about it probably walking around campus or watching TV, so why not address it?" Meyer said. "So, we address it and move on.

"I don’t want them to hear much about it at all after our conversation."

Ben Axelrod is Bleacher Report's Ohio State Lead Writer. You can follow him on Twitter @BenAxelrod. Unless noted otherwise, all quotes obtained firsthand. All recruiting information courtesy of 247Sports.