John Taylor January 2, 2015, 2:17 PM EST B1G day early helped motivate Buckeyes late It’s not like Ohio State needed any additional motivation, what with them playing the No. 1 team in the nation for the right to square off with Oregon for the first-ever College Football Playoff championship. They got some anyway, though, courtesy of a couple of their fellow Big Ten members. Michigan State, which OSU beat earlier in the year in East Lansing, roared back from 20 points down in the fourth quarter to stun fifth-ranked Baylor in the Cotton Bowl. More importantly, at least from OSU’s perspective, was the Outback Bowl. With Wisconsin going up against Auburn, OSU was watching one team it beat by 59 in the Big Ten title game and another that nearly derailed Alabama’s title dreams. After the Badgers knocked off the Tigers? The Buckeyes, 0-10 against the SEC entering the semifinal game against Alabama, knew then that an upset in the Sugar Bowl was possible. “I’ll tell you when I think the tide turned a little bit when Wisconsin beat Auburn. That was a major, major moment for us getting ready for this game,” head coach Urban Meyer said following the CFP semifinal win. “The pre-game meal, I think it happened. “And then we also have a little highlight video before we get on the bus. We talked about that. I watched the end of the Michigan State game. We were pulling hard for them. And then our players … you should have seen their faces, man, they knew. They knew.” After toppling Alabama, which came after they were down 21-6 at one point, in an upset that most didn’t see coming and a thought many wouldn’t even entertain? “We broke a barrier,” Meyer’s wife, Shelley, said. “We broke a barrier.” What it also did was to continue to break the spirits of the SEC in general and the West specifically. The SEC is 5-5 this postseason, with the West, the division that saw six of its seven teams ranked in the Top 25 at various points throughout the season, finishing off the 2014-15 bowl slate at 2-5. Only the 3-0 SEC East, the redheaded stepchild of the conference, is keeping this from being an utterly lost postseason for the league that, after winning seven straight BCS championships, has now gone back-to-back seasons without a title. The seemingly invincible is, suddenly, vincible, thanks in large part to a team that was down to its third quarterback and were decided underdogs. “The mind is a fragile thing. You know, all of a sudden you get down against a team like that, that’s No. 1 in recruiting every year for the past six, seven years, our guys know that,” Meyer said. “So at some point you’re going to get good results and very fired up for our conference right now, because at some point it gets exhausting when you keep hearing and hearing and then you start believing. “You see them on film. Great team. But we’re pretty good, too. And we go on the road in East Lansing and beat a team that beat Baylor. To play the way we did against Wisconsin, a team that just beat Auburn, that’s the psychological approach to getting 18-, 19- and 20-year olds to believe. We had a reflection moment with our team and a speaker the day before the game, and he talked about how strong belief can increase your level of play. Bad belief or poor belief can also lower your level of play.”
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 23:05:04 +0000
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