The Situational: The Edge of Glory

     

This becomes obvious when you look at any season in its entirety - there's very little to be learned about the story from what goes down in its opening chapter. The 2002 Buckeyes finished a perfect 14-0, winning most of their games by the skin of teeth via defense, clock management and field position in a manner that became disaffectionately known as Tresselball.

They escaped Saturdays that season with scores like 19-14, 13-7, 14-9 and were tied with Miami at 17-17 at the end of regulation in the Fiesta Bowl. Their opener? A 45-21 romp over Texas Tech that was 45-7 when Ohio State emptied its bench. This was not a sign of things to come. It's not at all how Buckeye fans remember 2002. Oh right, 2002, that's the one where we lit up a Mike Leach team.

Your eventual national champions! Struggling with Navy!

Pick a John Cooper season. Look at September. Now look at November. You remember November. Now take a Xanax, and I'm sorry for bringing that up.

You could do this exercise with the opening day results from any season. Even the scores that look familiar and comforting tend to obscure the tone of how the year went. The 2009 Buckeyes escaped Navy 31-27 and then let USC off the hook in Week 2. They lost to Purdue. Their season ended in Pasadena, having held Oregon - a team that beat the Trojans by 27 - to just 18 minutes of possession. It was live telecast of a glorious strangulation.

The 2014 Buckeyes also eeked out a win against Navy to start their season. They scored fewer points facing a service academy than they did against Michigan, Wisconsin, Alabama and Oregon to end their season while breaking dozens of offensive school records along the way.

Season openers are overrated. Season cadence is underrated. It's about enjoying the ride, wherever they choose to take us.

Welcome to the 2016 Season Preview edition of The Situational!

The OlympiaN

2004 was a pretty good year for Utah football

We have some breaking news, friends: Urban Meyer-coached football teams overwhelming tend to be great. Please cite The Situational if you share this.

The Rio Olympics just concluded, which bring another opportunity to take Meyer's tendency and shape it into a misleading statistical coincidence that brings comfort to our tribe. So, how have Urb's teams fared during Olympic years?

There's one outlier there, paired with six norms. Urban loves the Olympics.

Meyer also followed up his two weakest seasons - 2007 (9-4) and 2010 - with a BCS title and an undefeated season, respectively. But when you're 10-2 in postseason games and threatening Knute Rockne in coaching prowess, you don't need things like the Olympics to justify a trend. It's a fun exercise but about as scientific as tying global currency valuations to the price of a McDonald's sandwich.

That being said, Meyer has never gone undefeated and won a national title at the same time, or in an Olympic year. Rats. Just end the season now.

The DROUGHTS

Five men, 3 Hall of Famers, 342 wins, 14 Big Ten titles in 36 regular seasons with 5 undefeated. One B1G Coach of the Year award.

Two of college football's longest dry spells may finally get quenched in 2016.

The first goes back to 1979 when first-year coach Earle Bruce took on the unenviable task of filling Woody Hayes' shoes while leading the Buckeyes to an undefeated season that concluded in Pasadena. He was rewarded by the conference when he was named the Big Ten Coach of the Year.

This man and frog share as many B1G COY awards as the OSU coaches pictured above.

Bruce is still the most recent Ohio State recipient of this distinction. Legends like Ron Zook, Ron Turner, John L. Smith, Brady Hoke and Kirk Ferentz (four times!) have won it during that span. Prior to being named for Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler the award was named for late Wisconsin coach Dave McLain, who had a 32-34-3 record.

That made more sense. This is a prize reliably given to the coach who turns the most chicken shit into chicken salad. In Ferentz's case, he was rewarded despite being responsible for the pre-existing turds, conservatively, three times. Ohio State has insulated itself from contention by way of maintaining respectable sanitation conditions in its coop.

But 2016 is unique. Unprecedented matriculation to the NFL has created a roster full of new names which could elevate Meyer to a coaching distinction not seen in Ohio since The Who was playing Riverfront Coliseum, though Jerry Kill beat him out in 2014 when he took a similarly youthful roster to all of the titles and Bill O'Brien took the award when he ran the table in 2012 under a No Postseason cloud.

This could be the year, comrades. One less thing to complain about in the land of plenty. That's one drought.

Here's the other:

As if you needed another reason to despise Bret Bielema - his colossal choke in 2008 provided the singular highlight of the Rich Rodriguez era in Ann Arbor.

Michigan has a chance to finally end this streak, provided Michigan State and/or Ohio State are in the single digits once the Wolverines take down, quite possibly, no ranked teams ahead of traveling to East Lansing and Columbus. 

Could both droughts end in the same season? Ooh the Big Ten is thirsty!

The FASHION STATEMENT

The Global War on Cargo Shorts breached the shores of the 11W forums shortly after the publication of this Front Page WSJ article that, to its credit, taught me something I didn't previously know about this decade's most maligned article of clothing:

Retailers sell more than $700 million worth of cargo shorts every year in the U.S. At Wal-Mart, a pair can be bought for $8.50, while Neiman Marcus sells linen cargo shorts for $995 a pair.

You could buy a $1000 pair of cargo shorts or provide 27,000 meals in Haiti. Dilemma!

Anyway, fashion-shaming is generally either sexist (women shouldn't dress too sexy) or racially-charged (saggy, low-hanging pants). But cargo shorts-hate transcends both class and race. This is indicative of a completely different kind of discrimination. It doesn't have a formal name, but its guiding philosophy is basically Stop Enjoying Things I Don't Like.

Really, Leo DiCaprio? A UCLA hat and Birkenstocks?

It's fine to aggressively dislike harmless things, like Pokémon hype, dabbing or Drake's consistently shitty music (more on that in the next section) but evangelizing this view and pleading others to join your call is more obnoxious than any baggy article of clothing with too many pockets.

Take a look at this dumb article on making the case for why you should live without air conditioning as a prime example:

There are positive aspects of going without (air conditioning). Fewer house guests. More dinner invitations. That humble-bragging business. Showers. I can’t tell you how rewarding showers feel. And ice cream tastes way better.

Personally, I enjoy having house guests. Humble-bragging about living in a sweaty deathtrap is a homeless man's cry for help. I also like exiting the shower and not immediately sweating profusely because my house is a permanent sauna. I especially like when ice cream doesn't melt down my arm seconds after I start eating it. I'll do my part for the environment without abandoning one of the greatest inventions of all time, thanks.

And if you're an adult who wears cargo shorts that hang down to your mid-shin with a visible can of dip in one ass pocket, your Costanza wallet in the other, a BIKINI INSPECTOR keychain with 37 keys attached to it (35 that you don't use) jingling in one of your cargo holds and a Mountain Dew Code Red bottle half-filled with dip spit in the other - while wearing a football jersey and Crocs - then you're living your best life. Own it.

You do have the inalienable right to mock and be mocked. Just lay off the pulpit. And stop obsessing over other people's shorts.

The Bourbon

There is a bourbon for every situation. Sometimes the spirits and the events overlap, which means that where bourbon is concerned there can be more than one worthy choice.

One of the perks of living in the NYC metro is you get new products, movies and often concert tours before the rest of the country does. Sometimes that's neat. Other times Drake rolls out his new bourbon over the summer ahead of its wider release to the rest of the country.

Celebrity branding on private-label products isn't a new thing, nor are rapper endorsements for alcohol. Drake's Virginia Black is a similar private labeling hustle to what Bill Foley II undertook in financing the creation of Charles Goodnight bourbon from three Situationals ago. The difference is that Foley hasn't poisoned one of my favorite musical genres with bitchmade talk-flow ennui garbage. 

Pictured L-R: Virginia Black, Drake.

My challenge in tasting VB was to not think about Drake while doing so, which would lend itself to negative bias. Removing the brain from the tongue is difficult. Bourbon tasting is a holistic experience. We were already off to a bad start.

The bottle is reminiscent of what I'm sure the smoking lounge at the Toronto Crowne Plaza looked like in 1975, yet VB is a two-year old whiskey made in Lawrenceburg, IN by the same outsourced distillery that makes most of the bourbons in your bar that you believe to be artisan-made craft spirits, whatever that means.

There have been other VB reviews that have paired Drake songs with each glass, but this won't be one of them. Let's instead focus on what's important: If you prefer scotch to bourbon you'll probably hate VB, because it's even sweeter than the sweetest bourbons you've politely tried only once. This is true even if you're a scotch drinker that loves Drake (which means you're a pimply 16-year old scotch drinker and need to slow down before your parents notice the dent in their bar inventory).

Now, if you prefer bourbon you'll be in better shape. Think cherry taffy with shards of glass in it that turn out to just be harmless sugar granules. It's definitely different - and that's good - but most importantly VB isn't going to bring down an entire category by itself, like its chief promoter.

It retails at $40 and is worth picking up once. Allow your own palate to decide if you'll buy it twice.

The Playoff

It's been over two weeks since Ohio State unveiled #TheEdge as its 2016 season mission. My immediate reaction:

That Gaga song is going to be in my head through January. https://t.co/WJAun9HTcq

— Ramzy Nasrallah (@ramzy) August 8, 2016​​

If somehow you have never heard The Edge of Glory, you can do that here. But if you don't enjoy experimental electro-dance pop music - like hating cargo shorts, this is fine - then perhaps you'll like this version instead, which Howard Stern graded to be one of the best performances he's ever had in his studio (Stern has hosted David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Elton John and just about every musician of significance from the past 50 years on his show).

While season openers are vastly overrated, College Football Saturdays are not: We have officially reached The Edge of the offseason.

Next week is Game Week! Go Bucks.