Spartans vs. Ohio State Recap

"If you have nothing nice to say, then don't say anything at all."

"A picture is worth a thousand words."

A clever neologism should be minted from the merger of that pair of bromides and it would capture perfectly Ohio State's 45-7 dismantling of Michigan State. I don't speak Russian, and the English language is an insufficiently depressing tool to explain this game from the Michigan State perspective. What's left is rather the opposite of writer's block: Much to say, yet no way to say it.

Conversely, the nice words about Ohio State flow easily and the pictures don't begin to do justice to it all.

I'm writing this on Monday night. If on that first fake hand-off by the Buckeyes, Terrelle Pryor had run out of bounds and hid instead of headed to the end zone, then I'm reasonably certain that the entire Michigan State team and the ABC broadcast crew would still be quizzing Beanie Wells about what he did with the football.

It was exquisite. When Pryor was already ten yards downfield, half of the home crowd was still cheering a big "stop for no gain" by the defense, not yet noticing the deception nor that Pryor had the ball.

And on it went.

Pryor running. Wells running.

Pryor stiff-arming defenders. Wells stiff-arming defenders.

Pryor throwing calmly from behind protection. And Pryor throwing on the run... off his back foot... for a touchdown.

Jim Tressel took a calculated risk when he inserted the freshman as his starter over the Big Ten's best rated QB from last season. The gamble was that he could get the youngster's game smarts to match his boundless talent without costing Ohio State a football game (or more) during the transition. It was touch and go for a couple of weeks, but against Michigan State the crisis period ended abruptly. Ohio State now has two superstars in its backfield.

In the fourth quarter, the Buckeye faithful sitting behind me started laughing and yelling: "he's only a freshman—it only gets worse from here!"

True enough.

And, of course, it was a needless effort: The Ohio State defense scored 14 points all by itself and held the Spartans to seven. Put in the second-string Ohio State offense, tell it to just take care of the football, and the Buckeyes might still have won and easily covered the three-point spread.

Against such a machine, Michigan State needed a lot of extra turnovers to compete. Instead, the Spartans gave up five and got zero.

The really scary part about this is that Michigan State played the Buckeyes MUCH closer last year in Columbus. And that was a less-talented Spartan group playing an Ohio State team that went to the national championship game.

So what does that say about the group of Buckeyes on the field today?

This is not the same OSU that lost to USC in September. It will be very interesting if those two tangle again in a Rose Bowl (or something more?)

Rather than the more poised group that beat Northwestern the prior week, Michigan State sent the sometimes clumsy group that eked out a win against Iowa. And Ohio State sent one of the best teams in the nation ready to play its best game yet this year.

That's a picture worth a thousand ugly words if you're a Spartan.