Buckeyes aware of foe’s shame

Duke’s upset at Evanston has Northwestern reeling.

COLUMBUS (AP) — Coach Jim Tressel likes to think his Ohio State players live in a cocoon, only concentrating on their practices, their game, their immediate opponent.

But they are well aware of what’s going on around them.

The No. 8-ranked Buckeyes play Northwestern in the Big Ten opener for both teams Saturday. The Wildcats are coming off a humiliating 20-14 loss at home to Duke, snapping the nation’s longest losing skid at 22 games.

Asked if his players knew of Northwestern’s embarrassing defeat, Tressel implied that he doubted if they did.

“It’d be interesting if we polled our team, how many of them would know that,” he said Tuesday. “Maybe they would, I don’t know.”

As it turns out, while Ohio State (3-0) was flying across the country and back for an impressive 33-14 victory over Washington, the Buckeyes were following closely what was happening elsewhere in the college ranks.

“I know they played Duke and they lost,” defensive tackle Todd Denlinger said. “That’s college football for you: Anybody at any time can go out and win a football game.

Capable

“We can’t look at that, like, Northwestern’s a bad football team, because they’re not. They have a lot of capability to come into our house and give us a challenge.”

Denlinger denied that such talk was just for public consumption. He said he and his heavily favored teammates aren’t chuckling behind closed doors about how the Wildcats (2-1) took a pratfall.

“There’s no joking,” he said. “We can’t take Northwestern lightly. If we say they got beat by Duke and we joke about it, they’ll come into our house and embarrass us.”

That would be a change. The last time Northwestern beat the Buckeyes in Ohio Stadium was 1971.

The Buckeyes have won the last 13 meetings at home, not counting another win in the series when a game was played in Cleveland, a supposedly “neutral” site.

Tressel’s praise

Tressel doesn’t believe the Duke loss will dampen the Wildcats’ hopes.

“I don’t sense that Northwestern guys think that way,” he said. “Just watching them play over the course of the years, they are a competitive group. So I don’t sense that they will consider the world has ended.”

Coach Pat Fitzgerald is stressing to his Wildcats players that the advent of Big Ten play means a clean slate.

“You’ve got to look at it as one game, just as we look at this week as just one game,” he said Tuesday. “The great thing about our conference is that everything starts over once you start Big Ten play.”

The Buckeyes expect the Wildcats to bounce back.

“Regardless of what happened in the beginning of the season, everybody is trying to win the Big Ten title,” Ohio State fullback Dionte Johnson said. “I saw a quote that came from Northwestern: ‘Yeah, we lost to Duke, but now we’re focusing on the Big Ten. This is what we’ve really been practicing for.’

“They know Duke has no effect on their Big Ten standing so they’re still going out there to play their best game.”

Precedent

The Buckeyes, defending their first outright Big Ten title since 1984, don’t need to look back far to find an eerily similar precedent.

Just three years ago, ninth-ranked Ohio State was 3-0 and coming off a big road win at North Carolina State when it traveled to Evanston, Ill., to open conference play against the Wildcats. Northwestern was off to a miserable 1-3 start and had just been pounded 43-17 in its Big Ten opener at Minnesota.

Final score: Northwestern 33, Ohio State 27, in overtime.

“I can’t remember clear back to ’04,” Tressel said, stretching the truth.

He also declined to measure this year’s Buckeyes against the squad from three years ago.

“This group seems very interested in being good, not that that one didn’t,” he said. “They know that we need to get better in a lot of areas.”