bicranium

Couple things from today's practice for OSU... Braxton was working on the option with Cardale with Braxton obviously on the receiving end of the pitches. So that's slightly terrifying for other defenses. True freshman QB Torrance Gibson worked with the WR's (lots of playing time available there with OSU's 2nd, 3rd and 4th leading returning receivers suspended for the opener) and had this catch... http://i.imgur.com/TTxgiVC.jpg Lots of people thought he'd be a WR all the way but he's been working with QB's all week to this point and you can see he's still in the no contact jersey there. Could just be a temporary thing like how Devin Gardner played WR a bit at Michigan with the QB depth chart being as crowded and talented as it is at OSU right now.

Could be 100% wrong but I just don't see Sarkisian doing anything elite at USC. I'm also very interested to see if Vernon Adams can win the starting job at Oregon. He's getting a late start (just passed the math class he needed to graduate from Eastern Washington yesterday to complete his transfer) but he was a monster at Eastern Washington. And not just against FCS opponents. He beat a few FBS teams in his time there while putting up insane numbers. If he can get Oregon's offense figured out he could be scary. I don't think Mariota was that special. He did everything he did because of the system. I was never impressed with him. I think Adams could be very special. He did incredible things against FBS opponents while being surrounded by lesser talent.

There's actually 8. But yeah, the polls are pretty annoying. South Carolina's over-ranking by itself last season led to some of the worst rankings I've ever seen. It was absolutely hilarious how ESPN conned everyone into thinking Ole Miss and Mississippi State were all of a sudden programs on par with Alabama and LSU. Some of the top teams in the SEC were a little down last year and some of the bottom teams were a little up but ESPN and bad pre-season polls tricked everyone into thinking Ole Miss and Mississippi State were top 5 teams at one point in the season. Unfortunately the polls are setting up to do more of the same with 5-loss Auburn in the top 10, 5-loss LSU in the top 15 and 6-loss teams Arkansas and Tennessee in the top 25. And what 2 teams are sitting just outside of the top 25 in the others receiving votes section? Mississippi State who lost basically their whole team to graduation and Texas A&M who lost 5 games last season. So when one of the other SEC teams slips up they have reinforcements ready to take their spots. Luckily OSU just has to take care of their own business and they're in.

Saban has spent 18 seasons coaching P5 programs. Urban has spent 9 seasons coaching P5 programs.

Should be "losing" 4* RB/ATH George Hill here soon too. He'll end up at MSU.

The rumor was something like 5-7 a month or more ago but it eventually came down to 4 within the last couple weeks and those 4 ended up being correct. I don't know who the other 1-3 people were in that original 5-7 number but either they got their shit cleared up or they're still working on clearing it up. One name I have seen floating around is Darron Lee and that would be for academics. Would be pretty surprising to me if it's true just because of the kind of kid he seems to be but that's the only other name I've seen. Like LJ said, it wouldn't make sense not to announce them all at once unless there's still a chance a potential academic casualty could right his situation before the season starts.

Yeah, I think I agree with this. Braxton has been doing various WR drills for months but, like you said, zero in-game experience as anything other than a QB. I don't like the idea of him getting his feet wet against a Bud Foster coached defense. Unless Braxton absolutely blows people away in fall camp as an H-back, I'm going with Samuel getting the bulk of those reps vs. VT. Then guys like Braxton and Parris Campbell come into the mix. Heard this on the radio just driving to get some lunch... Marshall, Wilson and Smith had the 2nd, 3rd and 4th most receiving yards of returning players. Thomas is obviously #1. After that it's Zeke at 5, Vannett at 6 and Samuel at 7. I think Vannett has a chance to make a huge impact on this game with an experienced QB back there this time around. Heuerman was hobbled all last year with a foot injury, fought through it and wasn't as effective as a receiver as people may have expected. Vannett had some big catches in the playoffs including the short TD to take the lead vs. Oregon. With such young WR's I wouldn't be surprised to see him with around 40 catches this season.

The rumor was 5-6 guys a month or so ago, came down to the 4 everyone's mentioning about a week ago. With it becoming more widespread it could just force OSU/Urban's hand to address it sooner than they would have liked.

Pretty cool thing from Rivals of Pryor calling Urban to give him the good news... https://ohiostate.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=1786438 No subscription needed. I think the kid was nervous at first with the "yes sir" answers to basically everything so it was a little awkward but was still a cool little inside look.

Yeah, I've seen a lot of people lately talking about Pryor ending up in that "walk-out" LB role that Lee plays. LeCounte is basically in and then Lamont Wade from PA will likely end up picking OSU so that would be 5 DB's in the 2017 class if Pryor doesn't move to LB. And then there's the pipe dream of grabbing Darnay Holmes from CA who is listed as a 5* ATH but he was an absolute monster at FNL working out at CB. Strong possibility that we lose Shaun Wade though since he's a Trinity Christian kid but maybe with OSU having such a monster class building around him he won't want to mess around and will just stick with OSU all the way. With Pryor's commitment OSU now has a better 2017 class than these teams' current 2016 classes... Stanford, Florida, Clemson, UCLA, TCU, Notre Dame, Tennessee, Auburn, Baylor and Texas A&M.

Luke Farrell is in. Rumors that LeCounte is as well.

PSU's defense was definitely solid. I think they were top 5 in the country statistically. They did lose some starters though and don't have AMAZING talent to step in right away because of the short period of time where the sanctions did affect them but their DC is great and I definitely expect them to be one of the top 3 defenses we face again this season (VT and MSU being ahead of them). Harbaugh's interview with Cowherd was great... for OSU, MSU, etc. Michigan fans tried to play it off like Harbaugh was doing it intentionally because Cowherd was one of TONS of people who didn't think he'd go from the NFL back to college but in reality he's just awkward. Still think the rivalry between OSU/Michigan and Harbaugh/Urban could provide some fireworks. Think it was talked about within the last couple years when we've discussed expansion but people fully expect Fox to make a big run at getting the best of the B1G's TV rights when that contract comes up in a couple years. So starting to really invest and collect on-air talent is something they need to and are doing.

I don't think it will be too many since there are only about 5 spots left in the 2016 class but some names to keep an eye on over the next week or so... 2016 4* TE Luke Farrell (OH) 4* DB Damar Hamlin (PA) 4* DB/LB Andrew Pryts (PA) 2017 5* WR Trevon Grimes (FL) 4* DB Richard LeCounte (GA) 4* DB Isaiah Pryor (GA) Not all of those guys are going to be in town but with spaces filling up I could see them calling the staff and locking up their spots. Didn't list this kid since there isn't any reason to expect a commitment from him to anyone anytime soon but if he for some reason decided to commit to OSU this weekend while he's on campus (2nd visit to OSU this summer) it would be fantastic... 4* DT Antwuan Jackson (GA).

I definitely think we'll see them at some point. And even if we don't opposing DC's will be worried about it every game.

Not sure how viable trick plays will be at least early on since the article says he's still 2 months away from being healthy enough QB-wise but either way he's a freak athlete and hopefully he can do more great things for OSU to close out his career. Either way, I was pretty relieved when I first heard about this just because it helps focus the QB competition.

Haha... story came out sooner than I was expecting but here's why I posted that last night... http://www.si.com/college-football/2015/07/23/braxton-miller-ohio-state-move-wide-receiver

In recruiting news, 5* DE Nick Bosa just committed to Ohio State. People expected him to mull it over a little longer after his Florida school tour but instead he just went ahead and did it today after just finishing his visits to Florida and Florida state. His commitment pushed OSU into the #1 spot for 2016 classes. OSU also has the #1 class already for 2017 and could receive a commitment from Nick's teammate, 5* WR Trevon Grimes, pretty soon. Several other kids for the 2016 and 2017 classes could commit over the next week as well with a bunch of kids in town for Friday Night Lights tomorrow.

U-verse for internet only would probably be tolerable to me. My service with them never went out. All of my issues with them came from the way their service works when you have all of their services. If you only have internet then you never have to worry about what you're watching/recording eating into your bandwidth. And I think where I live satellite just can't be set up well. Have had Dish and DTV at different points and they always have a heck of a time getting the dish set up just right so I'd say the window they have to work with here just isn't big enough to provide any room for error. The signal is pretty much perfect in the diagnostics when the weather is good but the second there's anything remotely heavy going on with the weather it's pretty much guaranteed that we're going to lose signal. Luckily their on-demand stuff is solid, they have all the streaming partnerships (WatchESPN, HBO Go, etc., etc.) and then they even have online streaming straight through them for a lot of channels so if there's something I really need to watch when the signal is being flaky I can still usually find some way to watch it either live or within a reasonable amount of time on demand. I remember canceling WOW in early 2014 and agree it was a nice, easy procedure. Canceling TW a couple weeks ago when I went back to WOW was pretty annoying. I open by telling the lady I already have my service up and running with WOW, it's cheaper than even the promotional price you just stopped giving me and it's faster than anything you offer and she still put me on hold 3 different times to come back with a "better" offer that still cost more than WOW for slower speeds. I wasn't too upset by that because I know it's her job but then she threw some straight up lies on at the end about me now being in a contract with WOW and the price is going to skyrocket and all this other BS.

Line is -14 right now. Not sure where it opened (maybe -16ish I believe so you weren't far off) but that's where it is right now. Vegas people have OSU currently as a double-digit favorite for every single game in the regular season and also against anyone they would face in the B1G championship game. Only if OSU made it to the playoff would you possibly see a single-digit spread. Pretty crazy. And the VT game could be very challenging. Lane Stadium is no joke. VT usually has classes on Labor Day but announced there will be none this year due to the game. Night game, well lubed crowd, Bud Foster's defense, uncertain QB situation for OSU... not ideal. But the team wants revenge for its only blemish of the 2014 season so they should be motivated. It won't be Braxton. I prefer JT to Cardale based on what we saw last season. JT ran the offense beautifully. His performance vs. MSU (a team that finished the season in the top 5) on the road may have been the best performance by an OSU QB that I've ever seen. Cardale did a great job filling in for the post-season but he had some built-in advantages thanks to the way JT played during the regular season and a ton of help from a highly motivated defense, OL and Zeke.

Did they ever confirm an overloaded node? It took me a lot of annoying calls and visits from Insight back in 2007 or whenever it was to get them to even admit it was an overloaded node and that mine was 13th or 14th on their list of nodes to be split. I had no other option at the time so it was very, very frustrating. I got free internet for the 5 months or so it took them to eventually split the node but it was supposed to be 15mbps/768kbps and I was only getting around 1mbps/100kbps during peak hours so it might as well have been no internet. Here's 100 pings of google.com... http://i.imgur.com/IDxOy5S.png I do some pretty heavy torrenting and usually just limit the download to 9-10MB/s to leave enough bandwidth for anything else I want to do (gaming, Netflix, etc., etc.). Not sure how it would perform if I maxed it out but I could easily fix that by ticking on QoS on my router. Since I limit my torrents myself I leave it off though.

Less than 50 days to kickoff. Camp starts in a couple weeks. http://i.imgur.com/ifOYKt6.gif

Not sure how many around me are WOW customers. Have never had issues with slowdown with them. The issues I had that caused me to leave initially were actually ping related but that's been solved now. Haven't had speed issues (due to node overloading) since Insight actually. U-verse was just bad because of the way it's set up. With Time Warner I always got around 57mbps down/6mbps up with my 50/5 plan. With WOW I heard about their speed upgrades and kinda snuck in on the 50/5 tier for the free upgrade to 110/10 and usually get about 120-130mbps down/10mbps up. I'm only getting 1 upstream channel at the moment for some reason though so I've seen people post speed test results on DSLreports with WOW in central Ohio getting 11-12mbps up on a consistent basis. And what do you mean by "stress testing" my internet connection? I Google'd it and found some stuff but do you have something specific you'd want me to run or did you just mean speed test? Here's a speed test... http://www.speedtest.net/result/4520040700.png Here's another from a more "peak" time (10:44PM)... http://www.speedtest.net/result/4479643249.png And one more from around "peak" time (10:15PM)... http://www.speedtest.net/result/4428983176.png

I've had basically everything available in central Ohio and no service is perfect. Had Insight when they were around and they were awful because they didn't even want their central Ohio market. Obviously they sold everything to Time Warner eventually but I had jumped ship even before then and gone to U-verse. Being a national company I was worried about customer service but a friend I've known since 3rd grade ended up doing my install and would come out whenever we had an issue which wasn't often but the overall quality of service due to the way U-verse is set up is just bad. Sharing bandwidth between TV/internet is just stupid. The instant you have more than 2 HD streams going (recording 1, watching 1) you are eating into your internet bandwidth. Nope. Luckily WOW had just made themselves available in my area so I switched to them. They were solid for a while but their equipment was very unreliable (probably replaced our Ultra gateway every 3-4 months resulting in lost recordings/having to reschedule recordings on the new boxes) and early last year they bought some southern ISP's to expand their territory and spread themselves too thin resulting in poor quality of service. Because of that I decided to switch to Time Warner for internet and DirecTV for TV. With Time Warner I used my own modem so there was no rental fee and I wouldn't have to deal with low quality/used equipment anymore. Never had an issue. We had DirecTV and Dish in the past and it wasn't great during storms/snow/whatever but people had told me it was better so I gave it a shot. Unfortunately it's not much better. Any kind of serious storm will absolutely result in some form of signal loss. Even just heavy cloud cover usually will. And this was not a self install, this was done by DirecTV themselves. Once my 12-month promotional price for Time Warner was up I switched back to WOW because they sorted out the issues from a year ago and offer more than twice the speed for half the price. After the promotional price ended with Time Warner I was paying $98/month for 50 down/5 up. Now with WOW I'm paying $50/month for 110+ down/10+ up. Using my same modem I was using with Time Warner so no equipment quality issues and no rental fee. I'm on the back end of a 2 year contract with DirecTV and will likely be going back to WOW for TV when that's up. Using the time between now and the end of the contract to research my options for equipment though since their Ultra boxes were so unreliable the last time around. Looking at maybe getting something from TiVo to use with a cable card from WOW.

Still have this song playing in my head from time to time... N64 was great with that game when I had a broken arm in middle school because you could play it with one hand. Just Z for gas and the joystick for steering... no brakes required. Blood Wake and Crimson Skies need to have sequels or remakes or whatever on the Xbox One.

http://i.imgur.com/NcMav3Z.gif