I can't believe there's still one more game to go. I honestly thought that by now I'd be finished writing about football and could ease into seven months of watching old commercials on YouTube or something like that. But no, there's still one game to go, and this game fits with my philosophy of always rooting for the most hilarious possible outcome, no matter what. So far I've achieved my dream of getting P.J. Fleck drenched in room temperature mayonnaise and putting Penn State to sleep by finally picking them to win a big game. (That's what they get for proving me wrong so many times this season: when they really needed one more win, I bestowed my patented Kiss Of Death, otherwise known as "support.")
A lot of fans look at the two teams in this game, Ohio State and Notre Dame, and find themselves secretly or not-so-secretly hoping that Atlanta gets struck by a meteor right before kickoff Monday night. I've had fans from other conferences ask if my "Big Ten, no matter what" approach means I'll actually be rooting for the Buckeyes in this game, something which to them is tantamount to signing up for the Imperial Stormtrooper Academy. I wonder where they got the idea that I'm actually the sort of person that believes in stuff like "conference pride." It would be great for the Big Ten to win another title, but I have no investment in the outcome of this game.
So it is not misguided conference partisanship that leads me to say this: ever since losing to Michigan on the regular season's last weekend, Ohio State is playing like ... okay, I am old, so I'm going to ask if any of you remember the very old-school video game Berzerk? "Chicken, fight like a robot" and all that? Little monochrome dude running around a maze shooting monochrome robots?
Remember what happened if you took too long to clear a level? This little smiley face called "Evil Otto" would show up and start chasing you around the maze. He wasn't fast, but he was indestructible. Is Ohio State playing like all of a sudden it's Evil Otto and everyone else is taking too long?
No.
Berzerk had a sequel called Frenzy. Frenzy was the same game but more complex, and with one important difference: you could kill Evil Otto if you shot him three times. He would immediately respawn, moving faster than he was moving before, but shooting him could buy you just enough time to get out of the maze.
Except there was one maze that had a great big Evil Otto in the middle of it. If you shot the little Evil Otto in that maze, very bad things started happening almost instantly.
That's the best way I can describe Ohio State in the playoffs: they're the big Evil Otto, and everyone else just shot the little one. Does that guarantee a Buckeye victory? Of course not. But that's what I'm going to predict.
Ohio State 28, Notre Dame 24
