Air Force, ironically, cannot pass the ball for their lives. They lost their best player last year (Chad Hall), lost to Navy for the sixth straight year and are very much a 1-dimensional team. TCU and Utah would be decent wins, but no better than wins over OSU and MSU.
Air Force
is a quality win, despite your failed attempt to denigrate them. Army, Navy and Air Force have all won games in the recent past
without having completed a pass during said contest. The triple option causes nightmares for opposing defenses, and is hardly, despite your dismissal, incapable of moving the ball even in the face of opponents putting nine, ten and even eleven men in the box. It's the ultimate equalizer in the face of the service academies being unable to match bulk with 300+ pound monstrosities. Why do you think so many major colleges say "no thanks" when Air Force or Navy look to start a series with them?
As far as your mocking Penn State's OOC schedule, you should be aware that the Big Ten was required to add a 12th game to their schedule and not a lot of teams were available. Hence Coastal Carolina this year, and FIU last year.
Gee ... Rutgers and Fresno State managed to find each other only months before the game. It's more likely PSU couldn't find anyone tough to play because they
didn't want to. See below.
As you know, Temple was scheduled for a 6-year series to try and start an in-state rivalry ... and to help out Al Golden. It hasn't really worked.
Actually, I didn't know, nor do I much care.
Wonderful to be both generous
and grab yourself a guaranteed win all at once, ain't it? It's
really impressive to want an interstate rivalry with a school that essentially has
no chance to beat you.
(Paterno refuses to play Pittsburgh because they blocked our application to join the Big East)
Didn't know that either. That
blows. Never knew the Panthers were such cowards. I would have loved to see Rutgers play Penn State on a yearly basis, despite the fact the Lions would have won most of them. [RU would actually have whipped 'em for the first time in a 'coon's age (or ever; I don't recall) in 2006, had a distant shot in 2005 and a decent one in 2007. Other than that, well ...
]
But it is interesting that you give BYU and Utah credit for their OCC schedule because it's not their fault that those teams are bad this year, but only reluctantly give us that same bye over Syracuse, and take a dig at PSU for not traveling. Dude, we're going to Alabama in 2 years.
I did it reluctantly, but I did it.
That's what matters.
Did you give Hawai'i's 2007 team credit for the games at Michigan and at Michigan State, which both teams backed out of at the midnight hour, or that they were going to Florida in 2008?
I didn't think so.
The Lions will get more credit for visiting Alabama
when they actually visit
Alabama, and the same with their games with Nebraska some years from now. Until then ... sorry.
Nice try, though.
Most of the evidence I see indicates Penn State for the most part packs its non-conference schedule with palookas. That would be acceptable were the Big Ten as formidable as once it was. We both know it ain't.
Oh, and rather than citing a two-years distant game with 'Bama to bolster your argument, why don't we instead take a look at
next year's OOC schedule?
Yes, let us do just that.
Hmm ... it includes BCS powerhouses Akron, Syracuse (again, a
bit of a pass, but not much of one, as Syracuse continues its stay in Irrelevancy, USA), Temple and Eastern Illinois.
Oooh, scary. Way to man up out there at State College. 
You dismiss a 41-point win over Wisconsin because of a highly qualitative historical reason. Why not look at other history - namely, Wisconsin's notoriously hostile environment at Camp Randall and their win streak at home that Ohio State barely snapped before we got there?
But it
was already snapped, and
that's the trump.
This year (and we are, for the most part, talking about this year) they've beaten juggernauts Marshall and Akron at home; both games were pretty competitive into the second half, and only then became blowouts. Spare me that "they're
awesome at home, and we should be given huge credit for our win there" assertion. It's clearly specious.
But for the sake of argument, why don't we examine that awe-inspiring (and now defunct) 18-game home-winning streak a little more closely and see how many times the name "Ohio State" comes up in that little run?
That would be
zero, by the way. I did, however, see Akron, Marshall, Northern Illinois, Washington State, the Citadel, Bowling Green, Western Illinois, San Diego State and Buffalo. Don't get me wrong ... there were some nice wins in there, too, over pre-disaster Michigan, pre-Petrino Arkansas and Penn State. The rest, though, were Big Ten chumps and the Murderer's Row I listed above.
So much for being awesome at home.
Wisconsin hasn't beaten
anyone this year, other than a fairly solid Fresno State. They even lost to the Michigan team Utah popped in the same building. Don't be surprised if the Badgers go 6-6 this season.
I get it. You don't like that the little guy gets overlooked in favor of the name teams. Still, your argument has many flaws.
You've stressed that with which you disagree. That's different than my argument having "flaws," as I've shown.
In addition, stop reading into what you think I might mean, rather than what I say. I already acknowledged that if it came down to it, Penn State
probably wins the argument over Utah or BYU. My only point has been that it's
not an open-and-shut case. If you can't acknowledge that, and think 12-0 PSU deserves to go over unbeaten BYU/Utah
automatically, you're a hopeless homer.
Penn State's resume, right now, is based
enormously on an extremely impressive win over an Oregon State team that beat USC and gave Utah an excellent game. Take that one away and they're
barely in the Top Ten on merit.
All that said ... I hope they
kick the shit out of Ohio State, and definitely think they can.
