Killer Nuts Tailgating

My voice is mostly back, I’m kind of caught up on sleep and I’m still pretty pleased about the day we had Saturday. Here’s a look at what happened:

FOOTBALL: Ohio State’s special teams are indeed, uh, “special.” When Marshall broke a long kick return the week prior, I mentioned to Juan that Miami would likely have faster, better return guys and if the Bucks couldn’t get that straightened out, we might have some problems. And we did, to the tune of a kick return and a punt return for touchdowns. It wasn’t all bad — we had a couple of long returns our own selves — is everyone else happy to see Jamaal Berry finally on the field? — but the negative outweighs the positive here.

And that’s a shame, because it took away from an excellent defensive performance. Yes, the team gave up a lot of yardage, but they did so to a fast, solid offense; even with those numbers, the D surrendered just 10 points, for a total of, uh, 10 points on the season. My guess is that the defensive coaches were doing their best to guard against big plays, and that was largely successful. I’ll take that kind of effort every single time.

The offense was not spectacular, but it got the job done, scoring when the defense gave them the ball after a turnover or four, and although we didn’t hold the ball as long as I would have liked, putting points on the board is the name of the game. TP didn’t have a great game throwing the ball, but he showed off the other side of his game — largely ignored a week ago because it wasn’t needed — and turned in over 100 yards rushing.

PARKING: I mentioned last week that I wasn’t sure how this was going to go. As it turned out, we had little to be worried about. Crappydad got a pass for the South Lincoln lot — wihch the university’s parking and transportation folks said should be open through October — but we parked at Parks Hall, where we’ve always parked. Our usual spot has some kind of construction stuff going on, but our secondary spot — which was actually our original spot — was as accomodating as ever. It may turn out that we’ll be forced to park in the polo field lots by the end of the season, but for now, we have plenty of more pleasing options.

PARTY: In part because of the parking concerns, we got there early, as in about 8:15 Saturday morning. That’s leaning towards crazy-early for a 3:30 game, but it ensured we got to park where we wanted. And it was a nice morning, too — that extra time would have dragged if it had been as hot as it can be for the second game of the season, and it certainly didn’t feel like we were out there for six and a half hours by the time we packed up. Pat’s going to post the full menu, and Mrs. Crappy  has promised a post about the specifics of the main dish, but I can say that we ate and drank well.

NEXT: Mrs. Crappy and I are skipping the OU game (I know!) in favor of Podcamp Pittsburgh 5, so I’m going to be relying on the other KNTers to fill in the blanks for this week’s party. Y’all ready?