Skull Session: Jim Tressel Dumps on Jim Harbaugh, Ohio State Owns the AP Poll, and Eli Apple's Personality Has Come Alive

By Kevin Harrish on January 24, 2022 at 5:25 am
We've got a helmet in today's skull session.
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Just a friendly reminder that Mike Weber might be a proper seer.

Word of the Day: Ululate.

 1-STAR REVIEW. Jim Tressel hasn't coached at Ohio State for over a decade, but that didn't stop him from coming at Michigan off the top rope during an episode of the 1 Star Recruits podcast last week.

He gave a brutally honest review of Jim Harbaugh's tenure at Michigan.

“Because of his lack of winning in 'The Game' and lack of winning in the postseason, that makes it tougher to have a win-loss legacy. I really don’t know what his legacy is with his student-athletes and what the relationships are and so forth. And that’s the ones that last the longest anyway. The public is going to assess – as they should – the win-loss records. But the impact that you have with your students, that’s really what your record is and honestly, I’m not sure what those relationships are. So, I guess I’ve got to give him a 1 star on the win-loss thing."

It's almost like one good year doesn't magically erase the previous six years of complete mediocrity (at best)!

I love the way Tressel goes about this. He gives Harbaugh the benefit of the doubt that he might be positively impacting the lives of his athletes in ways that he doesn't know while simultaneously just dumping on him for being an objectively bad coach.

Cold-blooded.

 ALWAYS IN THE POLLS. The AP Poll has been around since before World War II. And since then, the Buckeyes have been a part of the top-25 more than any other program in the country.

And it's not all that close.

Alabama's been undeniably the most dominant program in the country the past two decades, but between this and the all-time win percentage rankings, there's a very good argument that Ohio State has been the most consistently great team in college football history.

 QUITE THE HEEL TURN. Eli Apple was notoriously quiet and reserved during his time at Ohio State, and I can attest that it wasn't just on the field or during interviews. That was just his personality.

But that Eli is now dead, apparently. And the new Eli has a lot of shit-talking to do.

Michael Thomas always insisted that Eli was the best trash talker of any of the DBs he faced in practice, I just never believed it. But this public heel turn has me fully convinced. Also, I hope this Eli stays forever. It's infinitely more fun.

As an aside, I remember going to Chick-Fil-A with Eli my sophomore year of college and showing him highlight videos of Joe Burrow, because he really didn't follow recruiting.

Life goes weirdly full-circle sometimes.

 IT'S WORKING? It's generally bad statistics to make assumptions and extrapolations on limited sample sizes, but I've never claimed myself a statistician, so I'm going to go right ahead and do that: it looks like NIL is keeping kids in school longer.

The one-time transfer could be impacting this number too and then there are also COVID-19's lingering effects on college football, so who really knows what's causing it. But a nine-year low with only two underclassman quarterbacks just feels like too much of an anomaly to be a coincidence.

 SONG OF THE DAY. "Build Me Up Buttercup" by The Foundations.

 NOT STICKING TO SPORTS. A woman is arrested for trying to purchase a child at the Walmart checkout... Two men propped up a dead man's body and brought it to a post office to try and collect his pension... Rio’s gangs of God blend faith and violence... What's the point of digital clothes?... I donated a kidney to my boyfriend, then he brutally dumped me... The Icelandic bakery that buries its bread in hot springs...

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