This is the column you hope you never have to write. The one you hate to write.
When you know – along with the rest of the college football world – that it’s over. Irrevocably over. Dead and not coming back. No chance.
And yet, you have no idea when and how it’s going to end. Just that it will. Because it already pretty much has.
What makes it so tough is that you still have big games to play – Ohio State here, obviously, then at Indiana and UCLA.
And as preferable as lining up against a backup Buckeye quarterback in the Coliseum might be, then you head on the road against two programs that are the poster boys for quick turnarounds in college football with the right coaches.
We all know about Indiana’s worst-to-first lightning reversal under Curt Cignetti – a national title in Year 2 for the team with the worst all-time record in major college football. And wonder why it can’t happen here. You know, in like five years. At a program that’s not exactly the worst in the history of college football.
And now USC fans have a crosstown lesson much closer to home that college programs can be turned around in less than the five years it takes a redshirt recruit to graduate – or halfway through-the $110-million Lincoln Riley decade-long ’s restoration at USC.
Like what UCLA – no really, UCLA, clueless, broke UCLA – is doing in football under Bob Chesney, whose Bruins grounded and pounded Wisconsin and left the Badgers broken and beaten with just a single touchdown at the Rose Bowl the last time we’d seen Luke Fickell’s team before Saturday in what many thought was the end of the road for the hot seat-occupying Wisconsin coach.
But the former Ohio State nose tackle’s team came out fighting, played fast, physical and oh-so-confident and found out how well that works against a super-soft, finesse-first, not exactly well-coached USC bunch as the farm boys from America’s Dairyland improbably outquicked their Trojan counterparts.
Although the confidence Wisconsin played with made it clear the Badgers already knew their game plan would work. And turned this into a cage match and stomped on a USC team Big Ten programs with a pulse just love to get in front of their home crowds.