Good morning. Like most of you, I was happy to see Thad Matta take home the award for best director in last night's critically acclaimed 68-60 win over No. 4 Michigan State.
From his use of a short bench, to pushing the right buttons at the right time – including a timeout early in the second half that spurred a 24-5 run – Matta coached perhaps his finest game of the season against one of the game's best.
But don't take my word for it. Here's a Sparty meltdown counting the ways Tom Izzo was out-coached by Thad Matta.
There were a lot of things to like about this win: Aaron Craft drove his way to 17 second-half points to finish with a new career-high of 21, Evan Ravenel played like a man possessed coming off the bench (10 points and 5 rebounds in 18 minutes) after looking frustrated and disinterested with his new role on the team, Sam Thompson posterized another hapless defender and the Buckeyes shot 19-23 from the charity stripe, to name just a few.
More importantly, the Buckeyes picked up two wins last week when they absolutely needed them. Prior to Wednesday's win over Minnesota, Ohio State had lost three of four, including a 71-49 debacle at the hands of Wisconsin at the Trohl Center.
Matta's team has now beaten two top-five programs in one season at home for the first time in school history and are playing with confidence as we close in on lose-you're-out season.
Next up is a trip to Northwestern Thursday night, where the Buckeyes have won the last two games against the Wildcats by a grand total of three points.
JORDAN HALL, NO LONGER A TAILBACK. You know why you should sail with the Buckeye Cruise for Cancer? Because it's for a great cause. You know why else you should buy a ticket for the boat? Because Urban Meyer will drop football news on your world while you're sipping a Mai Tai in flip-flops:
- He said Jordan Hall "will be a captain again" and he will no longer be a tailback. He's moving out to the hybrid No. 3 position "with Jalin Marshall and Dontre Wilson."
- He said Corey Brown will slide to the slot and the top three tailbacks will be Carlos Hyde, Rod Smith and Bri'onte Dunn, though he did say Warren Ball presents “an intriguing option” for them at tailback.
- Meyer said they have zero leadership on defense right now. He said Christian Bryant is the “emotional leader” of the defense, but they are incredibly young and he doesn’t know where the leadership will come from.
- Meyer said their top options at middle linebacker right now are Curtis Grant and Camren Williams. He said Josh Perry could play outside or inside but he’s not sure who else they have at linebacker. He about jumped out of his seat when Herbstreit mentioned Trey Johnson and Mike Mitchell, “I love freaks,” he said with a smile.
Lest you get too comfortable, know that if you slip, Meyer will make you do push-ups, flip-flops or not:
Someone asked Meyer about the OSU-Michigan rivalry. He responded by pointing out the fact they were wearing blue and made him do 10 pushups. When he got up, he accidentally said the word Michigan and Meyer made him do 10 more while threatening to get Anthony Schlegel on him.
REID FRAGEL MADE SOME MONEY. Three Buckeyes – fullback Zach Boren, tackle Reid Fragel and tight end Jake Stoneburner – performed at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis over the weekend and while all three put on good shows, it was Fragel who improved his stock the most.
Fragel, a tight end in 2011, finished 4th among all offensive linemen, and first among offensive tackles, with 33 reps of 225 pounds on the bench. Likewise, his 9'5" broad jump was good enough for 3rd among o-linemen and his 30" vertical jump was good enough for 5th in his position group.
If you're wondering, he clocked a 5.14 in the 40.
His overall body of work was good enough to push his grade to 77.0, which could project to a second round selection for Fragel.
♫ When that tight end hits the weights and grows into a beast... That's Marotti... ♬
Jake Stoneburner ran exceptionally well, finishing with a 4.65 in the 40, good enough for 3rd among tight ends, an 11.50 in the 60-yard shuttle (1st among tight ends) and a 4.27 in the 20 yard shuttle.
Boren, working out as a fullback, was clocked at 5.00 in the 40 and put up 25 reps on the bench, good enough for 7th among running backs.
Texas wide receiver Marquise Goodwin clocked a 4.27 in the 40, the Combine's second-best time in the last seven years, but it may not be good enough to get him into the first three rounds due to his lack of production in Austin (seven career receiving touchdowns) and the fact that Al Davis is no longer with us.
Meanwhile, Denard Robinson, who once claimed he could beat Usain Bolt in the 40, clocked a 4.43 in the event, good enough for the 9th-best time this weekend, but nowhere close to the top 15 times in the last seven years.
Defensive tackle Johnathan Hankins, ends John Simon and Nathan Williams, and linebacker Etienne Sabino are all in action today.
HUGH FREEZE'S CHALLENGE: ACCEPTED. It wasn't long after Ole Miss signed one of the top classes in the country that skeptics began to wonder how a school that had no real history of pulling in star recruits (save for the son of a legendary legacy) managed to sign the top-rated player in Florida, Georgia and Illinois on one day.
Head coach Huge Freeze responded to the chatter by taking to Twitter to defend his program, asking the public to email Ole Miss compliance if they had any facts related to recruiting violations.
Freeze would later delete the tweet, but not before it was retweeted thousands of times. You can imagine what happened next:
Eighty-five times over the next few days, someone [responded].
That’s according to Ole Miss’ general counsel office, which gave 54 of those emails to The Commercial Appeal this week in response to the newspaper’s public records request for them. Since the email address Freeze tweeted was an olemiss.edu address, whatever came to and from it was a public record, according to Mississippi law.
The released emails were ones the compliance staff had already scoured and determined did not include a violation; the school withheld the ones that contain information Ole Miss is still examining.
Of the 54 emails that were turned over to the paper, many were trolltastic. A sample:
-- “Go home Hugh, you’re drunk.”
-- “Your football coach tweeted a request to send emails to your office with proof of recruiting violations. Any decent football player signing to play for your pathetic football team is all the proof needed.”
-- “I have two things to report. The first issue is that he did not end the last sentence in his tweet with a period. The second is that if he is referring to “these young men,” then he should have used the plural “families” instead the singular “family.” These are both violations of grammar. As an institution of higher learning, Ole Miss should hold its highest paid public figures to a standard of using the language properly.”
Wake me if the any of the 31 reports still under investigation become a thing.
Meanwhile, the book is out on how Ole Miss defensive line coach, and Scout.com's national recruiter of the year, Chris Kiffin, gets it done. He sends hundreds of Facebook messages – 800 to five-star offensive tackle Laremy Tunsil and another 400 to Tunsil's girlfriend.
NOW YOU CAN HATE A GUY THAT LOOKS LIKE KRAMER.
Brueser sporting a new look...the guys call him "Kramer" #Badgers twitter.com/BadgerMBB/stat…
— Patrick Herb (@BadgerMBB) February 24, 2013
ETC. West Virginia is finding out that travel in the Big 12 kind of sucks... Freshman gonna freshman... So close, 50, so close... Seth MacFarlane's Oscar monologue... So many quotes.
