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A few more thoughts on the Iowa State game

Fox’s coverage of the 2011 game, OSU’s uni game was strong, Paul Rhoads curses, and a thought on the OSU offense-defense relationship.

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Photo Attribution: USATSI

Photo Attribution: USATSI

I posted my 10 thoughts Saturday after the game but I had a few that were lingering. Here they are.

1. Here’s how expectations frame the way we think.

Last year OSU scored 31 against Iowa State at home and you would have thought JW Walsh was going to win the Heisman the way people were talking about him. This year OSU scored 28 in the first 16 minutes of the game and then it was “cut Chelf” the rest of the way.

Chelf wasn’t good, I get that, but the difference between the two scenarios is that because OSU scored 28 early, you expected it to put up 90. In the game last year OSU was down 10-7 after the first and rolled to a 31-10 win. It felt better at the end because the offense started poorly. That’s an interesting aspect of fandom to me.

2. Those helmets, my goodness. That was easily the best uniform OSU has worn this season and probably a top three all-time look since it went to the new threads. It basically combined two of my three favorite helmets since 1960.

The only complaint I have, and this is the definition of picking nits, is that the stripe down the middle could have been a few inches wider either way. Other than that (even with that) they were pretty perfect.

3. My man, Nolo, was on fire yesterday:

This was all-time and got zero love.

So was this, though much less subtle.

4. I appreciated Fox talking it easy on us with the 2011 highlights. It didn’t have a great start and OKC Dave had a pretty hilarious suggestion for them the rest of the way:

https://twitter.com/okc_dave/status/394133491299803137

They tempered it though (thank God) and, to my knowledge, we never even saw Paul Rhoads’ postgame speech (probably because his in-game speech for this game was so much more entertaining).

(This is NSFW, by the way).

5. It felt like OSU got a ton of first-half calls that helped it jump out. The questionable pass interference on Jhajuan Seales on the first drive, the defensive holding on the third TD, and the pass interference against Brandon Sheperd that even raised an Ed Hightower eyebrow.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t have won without those but they sure do change the complexion of a game in a hurry.

6. Is Chelf the best fake-handoff-er ever? Or does Fox just hire horrendous camera guys? I’ll admit he had one last week at TCU that fooled me and everyone within a JW Walsh pass of where I was sitting (to be fair, not a large radius, but still).

7. Sometimes it feels like the relationship of the performance between OSU’s offense and defense is directly related. What I mean by that is that OSU’s defense faced around the same number of possessions against TCU and Iowa State and held TCU to far fewer points because…it had to?

Now maybe this is a function of Iowa State’s offense just being that much better than TCU’s (“better” is, clearly, a relative term) but don’t you think if OSU had scored, like, 30 today that Iowa State wouldn’t have crossed the 20-point mark? I just think psychologically you have to think “Oh, offense is cranking today, we can chill a little bit.” Maybe not though.

There has to be a Malcolm Gladwell book in here somewhere.

More to come later today.

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