Family, friends, well wishers, thank you all for coming. Today we remember the life and mostly the death of our good friend, the college football offseason. For 210 days, 5040 hours, 302,400 minutes, or somewhere north of 18 million seconds (whichever you prefer), the offseason provided us with a resting place of sorts, an undying land in which we could digest Ohio State's national championship in peace, rewinding DVRs and YouTube clips over and over and over again. Starting Monday that sanctuary will be gone, as the Buckeye players, coaches, and fans clamber out from their dens of inequity deep within the bowels of the earth and stare bleary eyed at the glaring sun of expectations.
Ah, broken is the Sugared Bowl! the Tide flown forever!
Let the victory bell toll! -a drunken fan floats on the Scioto river -
And, Marcus M, hast thou no friend? -weep now or never more!
"See! on yon lone and impressive stone lies our reward, seed four!"
Come! let the alma mater be read -the Sloopy song be sung! -
An anthem for the manliest men that ever won so young -
A jig for them, they doubly so in that they balled for fun.
I know that we all say that we're happy about the death of the offseason. That we've divided our lives into sections labeled "football" and "not football," and that every moment lived in "not football" is an unending hell from which there is no escape. And maybe if you root for a team that sucks that is true, because if you are one of those unlucky souls who root for the Boilermakers or Illini or Browns or any other team that gleefuly stomps on the souls of the very real human beings that root for them your offseason is pain and your regular season is a confirmation that you can still feel it.
But you, probable Ohio State fan, didn't have that these past several months. Your team won the damn national championship, and in the ensuing months the biggest thing you've had to worry about is a quarterback "controversy" with no bad options, a one game suspension for a few (admittedly very good) players, and a new Michigan coach who zigs whenever you're expecting him to zag.
In the meantime, you had the chance to watch the entirety of the B1G Championship, the Sugar Bowl, and the National Championship so many times that the DEA now classifies Ohio State fan YouTube videos as a Schedule 1 drug. The offseason allowed us to live fat off the bountiful harvest of smug superiority, and boy howdy did we.
Invasions of Alabama and Oregon message boards. Meme after meme comparing Cardale Jones to some kind of trickster god from Norse mythology. The complete annihilation of the phrase "Luckeyes" from the college football vocabulary as we casually reminded everyone who would listen that we played three juggernauts in a row with a third string quarterback and a missing defensive end and a witches' curse probably and STILL blew them out of the water.
The offseason gave you that power to be self satisfied and cocky and gloriously obnoxious to your family and coworkers. And now, for all intents and purposes, it is gone.
"Buckeyes! ye hated her for her length and loved her for her pride,
And when fall camp began again, ye blessed her -that she died!
How shall the offseason, then, be read? -the requiem how be sung
By you -by yours, the rolling eye, -by yours, 'O offseason, be done!'
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?"
So where does that leave us, the living?
Well, as usual, there's football to be played and games to be won and rivals to be defeated. But 2014 is long gone, and the bacchanal celebration that went along with it is over. In the coming weeks, Eleven Warriors will be providing you with more preseason content than you can possibly handle. We will look at the 2015 Ohio State football team from every conceivable angle, all for you, the reader. But what we won't do is re-hash the 2014 championship run, because that is over, and so is the offseason that let us enjoy it.
R.I.P., offseason. Little loved but absolutely essential, you will be missed.
In lieu of flowers, 11W asks for any donations to be made to Doctors Without Borders. Actually, that's not even a joke. You should do that for real, they're an incredible organization.
