The best coach in the Big Ten has gone 50-4 since arriving in the conference, losing only one league regular-season game in four years. He has gone to three straight major bowl games and won a national championship. He has not lost to his top rival. But thanks to the never-ending publicity that follows Jim Harbaugh, with headlines piling up on a daily basis, Urban Meyer has receded out of the spotlight so far this offseason, taking a backseat to his Big Ten nemesis. Harbaugh is new and certainly different, resulting in national offseason attention that few individuals outside of Johnny Manziel have generated in college football history. It has to be a strange feeling for Meyer and the Buckeyes. Last year, after winning the national championship, the attention in the spring rarely veered away from Columbus. Speculation about the quarterback battle between Cardale Jones, J.T. Barrett and Braxton Miller raged for months, joined by the intense hype generated by so many key players returning, which made the Buckeyes the unanimous No. 1 team in the preseason AP poll. This time, Harbaugh and Michigan are the talk of the college football world, with plenty of experience returning to a team that went a somewhat surprising 10-3 in his debut. Ohio State failed to live up to expectations in 2015 despite going 13-1 with a Fiesta Bowl win over Notre Dame and a blowout win over Michigan, as it lost on a last-second field goal to Michigan State and subsequently missed the playoff because it did not win the Big Ten…
Continue Reading: Quiet in Columbus: Don’t Sleep on OSU
