The much anticipated, much ballyhooed OSU-PSU game is upon us. At season’s outset, we all thought November 7 would be the bigggggggggggg day for the bigggggggggggg game, but it has turned out to be a little less consequential than the pre-season hype would have had it. (Yeah, the rose colored glasses were all seeing the winner of this battle going to the SSMNC game, while the loser would have to cry in their beer in Pasadena, thinking about what might have been.) The NCAA FBS is a cruel world, however, and things usually don’t tend to work out as our simplistically idealistic pundits would want them to.
So, #11 Penn State (8-1, 4-1 Big Ten) will host #15 Ohio State (7-2, 4-1 Big Ten), not for all the proverbial marbles but presumably for some pretty significant agates, namely, a potential piece of the Big Ten championship and peradventure, a possible BCS bowl, perhaps, maybe, perchance.
This is where hack sportswriters typically get into pontificating about who is going to what bowl if this and that happens, and who “controls their own destiny.” This is where this Turkey gets off. I’m with Paterno. Play the damn games one at a time without characterizing them with something in particular that has a p=.31 probability of happening if our team wins, Iowa loses, Michigan beats OSU down the road, Obama farts, and Paris Hilton is found to be mono-orgasmic.
I particularly despise the trite piece of crap sports slang: “controls one’s own destiny.” See my earlier post on the subject.
But this isn’t about me. Or is it? Yeah, I write this stuff to amuse myself, but I hope that in the process, I’m amusing someone out there in the vast, silent but bucolic pond of kindred spirits who read the Turkey, as well as in the fetid, redolent, malodorous cesspool from whence steenking Turkey haters surface occasionally to accuse this pristine journalist of not giving Iowa enough credit whilst dissing Paris Hilton’s dysfunctional clitoris. But I digress.
