i do it for the ladies

[Not the usual author alert: Ace is covering Beilein's Bahamas tourney so I get to preview Urban Meyer's football team. That sounded way more fair when I agreed to it.]

Finding a good game to preview Ohio State is like, well, finding a good game this year to judge Ohio State. They didn't play a ranked team until last Saturday, and that was played under a barrage of rain and wind and game planning so awful David's mom was asking why they aren't passing. I also wanted to find a game that Barrett played extensively, which left us with just Hawaii, NIU, Rutgers and Illinois.

So: Illinois, which is 16th in defensive S&P (and has a pro-style QB in Wes Lunt). The Illini brought a lot of stunts and scrape exchange blitzes meant to mess with Ohio State's zone read game. This worked sometimes—Bill Cubit is a much better football coach than the guy he was working for—but as often as not they just couldn't close before the Ezekiel Elliott jetted through. Like so many other Big Ten opponents Ohio State has been #blessed to play between odd-year Spartans, the Fighting Illini were finally ground down by an effective modern spread machine.

Personnel: This chart does not lie:

click to big

That's a lot of star power, but most of it's used as little more than a diversion for good ol' five yards and a cloud of bitchy 5-stars.

As much as I love these guys on Twitter, once you see these atrocities, this utter abomination on the field, you too will be screaming for Tim Beck to be shipped back to the Big Ten West cornfields. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to hate the spread.

[Hit THE JUMP for the rest of the breakdown]

no more really good runs at the end of MAC blowouts

Brady Hoke's kicking off spring practice with a press conference and has announced the following players are departing:

• RB Mike Cox: we'll always have you dancing on the internet.
• C Rocko Khoury: we'll always have that Iowa game you played decently well in last year.
• WR Terrence Robinson: we'll always have Dream Shake and your sexy cocked eyebrow.
  
  
  
  I look forward to your Old Spice commercial.
• LS George Morales: we'll always have mortified punter gif even if you had no involvement with it.

Cox never played and was never going to play even if Michigan was down to Paki O'Meara as an alternative; Khoury was the backup center you may remember not snapping it to Denard on the first drive against Virginia Tech; teeny tiny Robinson found a role as a punt gunner last but will will not reprise it. Morales is only notable as the walking embodiment of Late Carr Era recruiting failures; he was never actually on scholarship after the first year, IIRC.

Zero of these guys had eligibility for 2013, so this frees up no scholarships for that class. Hoke said all are graduating, so no need to fret about APR issues. As far as team issues: I'd rather have Khoury and Robinson around to contribute, even if slightly. Chopping down the center race from three guys to two is worrying, and we don't even get to expand our 2013 class projections. Boo to that.