FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS

It's going to be a long, bumpy season Memphis Buckeye fans.  Very long.  It's amazing just how far and quickly the powerful Buckeyes have fallen.  We're talking about a team that won BCS bowl games the last two years against top flight competition.  A team that was #1 in the country last year heading into Madison.  We've beaten _ichigan 7 times in a row (on the field that is).

Now our offensive line allows 9 sacks in a single game with more false starts than a junior high track meet.  I'm still not sure why Braxton Miller was pulled from the game when he spent the entire night running for his life.  We had negative yardage in the second half until deep in the 4th quarter.  Half of C Deck was empty (and I'll admit I was already on the road heading home from our game watch) when we finally scored a touchdown. 

There is plenty of blame to go around and it feels counter productive to head down that path here.  I do feel sorry for Luke Fickell however.  He was placed in an impossible situation of trying to win with a coaching staff he inherited and with no head coaching experience himself.  Not a winning combination as we can painfully see.  Confidence appears to be at an all time low on the Buckeye sideline and that won't be easy to fix in a few days of practice. 

I honestly thought at the beginning of the season that we had a chance to be pretty good.  Maybe very good.  If we could win at Miami and hold off MSU in Columbus, then the Tat 4 would be back and we'd have a decent chance in Lincoln.  Now I'm hoping that we can somehow figure a way to keep it close against the Huskers.  That's right, keep it close.  And when the Badgers come to town hide your eyes cause that one won't be pretty either.

So it's time for a realignment of expectations for TBDBITL John.  We're going to have a long year and teams we have beaten with regularity in the Tressel era will revel in it.  I can't blame them...we've done our share of Scarlet and Gray yapping I suppose.  It's a classic case of "what goes around comes around." 

I'll close with the best line I read all weekend out on the Buckeye blogs...is it possible to vacate this season?

Go Bucks!  Yea Ohio!