Skull Session: Weber and Dobbins Tag Team, C.J. Jackson Expected to Break Out, and Braylon Edwards Suspended For Speaking Truth

By Kevin Harrish on September 4, 2018 at 4:59 am
Lol, I scored a touchdown.
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Don't mind me, I'll just be watching this on repeat until Saturday.

ICYMI:

Word of the Day: Pother.

 TWO-HEADED MONSTER. Folks, I'm beginning to think it's not really fair that Ohio State gets to have both Mike Weber and J.K Dobbins.

It's one thing to have star players, and lots of them, but it's a little absurd to have two former 1,000-yard rushers who can just take turns pounding an opposing defense while the other rests up on the sideline for his go.

It's like a damn water-cooled machine gun.

From Tim Bielik of Cleveland.com:

But if you play fast, you can't substitute. That means after the players completed a play, they have to hurry up back to the line of scrimmage and get ready for the next one. Then they have to do that again and again until either the drive is over or the offense needs to change up personnel.

That's a reason why Day and the Buckeyes have been trying as much as possible to give Dobbins and Weber as close to a 50/50 split in order to keep that tempo going. But he also added there's a magic number for plays to watch on drives.

"Sometimes when you go with a series that there is four plays. They're just rolling. You know, we had a couple of those drives," Day said. "But then if it gets into six, seven, eight, nine play range, it also depends on what he's involved in. 

"If he just had a run for ten, and he turns around and runs the ball over here for another ten, and now you get to play four and five, and he starts to show fatigue, then that might be a time to get him out."

Early on, I wanted to see both of them on the field at the same time in two-back sets, but after seeing how they work as a tag-team instead, I'm all in on this.

 CJ JACKSON BREAKOUT YEAR. For about a year, I've been of the opinion that C.J. Jackson was the most important player on the Buckeye basketball team, even if he wasn't the best.

This year, he might have to be both.

From NCAA.com:

It’s usually wise to pick a breakout candidate off of a Chris Holtmann-led team. Keita Bates-Diop exploded last year. The Buckeyes were one of the most pleasantly surprising teams in college basketball, but they lost a lot in the offseason.

Jackson is the most important piece who returns. He averaged 12.6 points on 41.6 percent shooting and 37.9 percent from 3. Ohio State welcomes talented recruits and transfers, but it feels like Jackson will be a primary offensive option.

He’s small, but other than that, Jackson has plenty going for him. His pull-up 3 is legitimate and he beats defenders off the dribble with ease. Jackson averaged 3.9 assists as a sophomore, a solid clip for a guy who was sharing the ball-handling duties. He could average something like 15 points and five assists as a junior.

Jackson is legit, but I think he's even better when he's able to play off the ball as a shooting guard. And no disrespect to Andrew Dakich, but Ohio State really didn't have anybody else to play the point last year. With Keyshawn Woods joining the team this year, that's now an option.

In any case, I don't think it's even worth worrying about quite yet. My early #take on Chris Holtmann is you can take your preseason expectations for this team and just add about five wins to it.

 FORMER BUCKEYES THRIVING. Joe Burrow wasn't the only former Buckeye wearing different colors this weekend. A few other one-time Ohio State players did some things for their new teams.

First off, we have this absurdity from Darius Slade, who somehow one-upped Joey Bosa's running back projectile walk-off sack against Penn State.

See, Bosa just drove a running back backwards into Christian Hackenberg's legs. Slade straight up picked a running back up of the ground, tossed him at his own quarterback, forced a fumble, and recovered it himself.

That's Clowney-esque.

Trevon Grimes meanwhile, scored the first time he touched the ball down in Florida:

And Antonio Williams scored one of North Carolina's two touchdowns in a 24-17 loss to Cal. 

It's kind of insane that the immediate success of players transferring out of the program could now be a recruiting tool, too.

"Come to Ohio State, compete for a spot. If it doesn't work out, we will have prepared you to be better than anyone else anywhere else, and you still have a path to the NFL."

 MICHIGAN MAN TELLS TRUTH, GETS SUSPENDED. You can honestly take your pick of early-season Michigan debacles over the past few years. There's Appalachian State's miracle, Toledo's triumph, and my personal favorite – a Utah running back striking Desmond Howard's Heisman pose in the Big House.

Hello Heisman!

But we can now add to that list: "former Michigan player is so fed up he literally risks his job to dish #takes online."

In the midst of Michigan's bed defecation against Notre Dame, former Michigan receiver Braylon Edwards – a current BTN on-air analyst – Tweeted this since-deleted and extremely valid Tweet:

See, nothing Edwards said was necessarily wrong, but it still didn't go over well with his employer, as BTN suspended Edwards indefinitely on Monday, due to a "violation of the network's social media guidelines."

Jim Harbaugh was not pleased.

That's not really fair to Iowa, which has won its Division and beaten Ohio State within the past five years.

Edwards eventually apologized, but hilariously refused to apologize for calling the Michigan football trash, because he was right.

 INVASION, REBELLION, INSURRECTION, ETC. Over the weekend, rain and lightning forced Nebraska to cancel its season-opener with Akron.

This has caused a bit more drama than anticipated, as it's now unclear which school – if either – should be awarded damages for the cancelled game.

The contract Akron signed provides a quite creative list of reasons why a game might be cancelled and absolve either party of liability, but somehow "rain and lighting" was not one of them.

"Disaster, fire, hurricane, tropical storm, flood, earthquake, war, act of terrorism, invasion, hostilities, insurrection, confiscation by order of the government, military public authority, or prohibitory or injunctive orders of any competent judicial or other governmental authority."

It seems as though whoever wrote this contract believed the game was being played in South Sudan and not Lincoln, Nebraska.

I'll be the first to admit that I've never been to Lincoln, but an insurrection or invasion does not seem imminent enough to be a key component of this contract, especially if that means omitting something like "lightning storm" from the list of things that might postpone a game.

 THOSE WMDs. Cincinnati, the next Hollywood... Kindergarten greets students with pole dancing performance on first day back at school... Rewriting the rules of the book club... The prison escape that riveted a nation...

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