Urban Meyer made statistical history. http://t.co/z8QOS1qeX1 pic.twitter.com/1vhKzAVKPt
— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) January 14, 2015 Urban Meyer’s now had 2 of the most improved championship teams ever
This is kind of the Ohio State head coach’s thing.
Tom Pennington/Getty Images
“Change in Elo rating across the season” shows how much each team improved over the course of its season.
This year’s Ohio State Buckeyes have a few obvious parallels to Urban Meyer’s championship teams at Florida.
They lost a surprise game at home to Virginia Tech in September (there are T-shirts!), just as the 2008 Gators did to a then-unranked Ole Miss (the TIM TEBOW SPEECH GAME). They used multiple quarterbacks, with walking battleship Cardale Jones and smaller-than-prototypical J.T. Barrett finding physical corollaries in 2006’s Tebow and Chris Leak. And they run the ball until you want to cry and knock your quarterback over a lot.
The most important one might be how much they improved between August and January, going from an inexperienced group that goofed around against Navy to a horrifying juggernaut that beat Wisconsin, Alabama, and Oregon by a combined 143-55. Buckeye fans compare this to some comic books thing.
The really scary part: if OSU returns everyone it expects to return, they might pick up right where they left off.
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