College football’s game of the week: No. 2 Penn State at No. 6 Ohio State (3:30 p.m. ET, Fox). The winner gets Big Ten frontrunner status and also a nice helping of vengeance.
Why the Penn State-Ohio State game means revenge no matter who wins
Last year, one team won the battle. The other won the war.
Matthew O’Haren-USA TODAY Sports
If Ohio State wins, the revenge angle is obvious. PSU won last year in Happy Valley, putting itself on a Big Ten title path.
And the Nittany Lions did it in dramatic fashion, on a blocked field goal return late in the fourth quarter. The win knocked the Buckeyes from No. 2 to 6 in the AP Poll, from a tie for first place in the Big Ten East to sitting in third. The Buckeyes moved back up when they beat Michigan in their final game, but Penn State won the tiebreaker.
Revenge is on Urban Meyer’s mind this week, and it might be on his players’, too:
“You’ve got to figure you’re dealing with youngsters,” Meyer said via ESPN. “Is revenge a motivator? Hell yeah, it is.
“I’m not saying this will be it,” he continued. “There have been times we used it and we looked silly using it, and there are times it worked. I don’t know yet. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday isn’t about that; it’s about execution of a game plan and focus.”
While it’s obvious that revenge is a theme inside Ohio State’s locker room, it’s nice to have a head coach actually admit that it definitely could be used, instead of taking the high road and playing it down.
“I’ll kind of listen and watch,” Meyer said of playing the revenge card with his players via ESPN. “I think you’re talking about 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds. We’ve used [revenge] quite a bit, and then other times, we moved on.”
Ohio State has lost seven games in six years under Meyer’s leadership. Clearly a revenge game.
If Penn State wins, it’s revenge for OSU taking its playoff spot last year.
The Buckeyes made the four-team field as the No. 3 seed. They didn’t lose after that Penn State game, either, and they edged Penn State despite not having a conference championship. The Playoff selection committee still hasn’t taken a team with two losses, and it didn’t think the Nittany Lions were good enough to be the first.
But Penn State can still be mad about it. While PSU would’ve been the first two-loss team to make it, Ohio State became the first non-Power 5 conference champ to ever qualify. Whoever got in was going to be exceptional in some way, and the powers that be chose the team that lost the head-to-head match, because it simply thought the Buckeyes were the better team on the year as a whole (they didn’t lose to Pitt or get blown out by Michigan, after all).
Penn State blog Black Shoe Diaries says:
We aren’t going to rehash the arguments that have been heard ad nauseum over the past 10 months over whether or not the 2016 Big Ten Champs were worthy of being included in the Playoffs. At this point, it’s irrelevant what I, or you, or even the then-Playoff committee thought. What is relevant is the fact that the 2016 Penn State team believed themselves to be worthy. And they were left out.
Left out in favor of the team they beat head-to-head. Left out for a team that didn’t even win its own division. Left out by a program that is elite, yes, but also overshadows most other teams in the conference if not the nation.
Meyer himself thinks Penn State should’ve been in the playoff, presumably over Washington.
But if Penn State wants to be mad, getting beaten out by a team you beat is pretty good fuel.
You can choose your own revenge adventure. I prefer the Penn State narrative because it’s more exciting than the usual.
“That team beat us. We will now beat them” is, while fair, a pretty boring REVENGE GAME approach. You know what you should have done? Not lost in the first place.
Penn State’s beef with Ohio State is more real than getting outplayed in crunch time and losing a pivotal game. The Lions have a case to actually be mad at someone for wronging them, and that makes their REVENGE GAME angle far more compelling.
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