Hey, hey, where you been? But God talk is about to begin. Hey, hey, hey, come on in.

Welcome to the episode of Baccatox, it means Andrew Gillis, Nathan Baird, and we are going to jump into an alternate reality for this big pod.

The 12 team playoff will start next year, but we're going to use that logic as if we're living in that world already for the 2023 season to see how much it may maybe changes the way we're talking about the Ohio State football team right now,

which is 5 and 0. So right now their playoff holds are still very much alive, but there's a way we have talked about Ohio State for the last decade, whether you're a fan or you're a media member or you're holding football to yourself.

That's been in the vein of can they get one of the four spots and sometimes they've needed a big 10 championship to do that. Sometimes they haven't needed a big 10 championship to do that, but regardless, your margin for error has often been small and you've needed help whenever you've crossed that margin of error.

So we're going to take that margin of error out of the out of consideration for this pod.

Nathan, I'll start with you as you're training your mind to get ready for a situation where a one loss Ohio State team isn't in a do or die situation going forward.

How are you thinking about this Ohio State football team? If I'm asking you to think about this 2023 Ohio State football team as if the 12 team playoff is started right now.

What is the first thing that changes and how you evaluate and how you analyze this football team?

Well, it kind of starts with a slight correction to what you said before and we've talked about this in the past that I think when we say Ohio State is playing for one of four playoff spots.

It's not really correct. They're really playing for one spot. They're playing for the spot that the big 10 champion gets or that the or in a weird year break like we had in 2016 and two lost big 10 champion, but Ohio State only has one loss and they get to go.

Like there's usually varying both things that are getting one team from each conference into this once in a while like you had last year but Ohio State need a lot of help.

So I think that helps demonstrate the urgency that's here and this has been on my mind this week because it's I don't feel like our coverage has been overly negative or across the beat that it's been overly negative.

People can go listen though to like Ryan Day's press conference on Tuesday and Jim Knowles and they're coming off a 20 point win against a team that was undefeated and it's just a lot of questions about how do you fix this?

How do you fix this? Are the linebackers not that good anymore? Is this offensive line a catastrophe like reading between the lines of like every question that these people get including from people like me and we've written about the coming out of that Maryland win.

We wrote about plenty of positive things to Josh Proctor and and Marvin Harrison Jr. and JT two and a low out and plenty of other things right.

So it's not that we have ignored the good things that came out of that win, but I think it will in the future I think all those questions will still be relevant, but it's the urgency is going to be different because right now those questions are important because you cannot afford even one loss to another really good team.

You're still have any security of getting in the playoff if they lose to Penn State in two weeks the odds are they don't make the playoff.

They they become there on the outside looking into playoff halfway through the season and in the future you lose one game to Penn State and now you are probably on the outside looking end of a buy but you're still making the playoff you just lost to a top 16 that's really good and there's probably going on and doing other good things so it's going to change I think it's probably going to bring a healthier tone.

To how we cover the team and maybe it should be instructive to even how we're covering this team because it's a little bit out of their control that the playoff format is so constructive like they're trying to do what they can every week to show up in win games and it's it's the format of the sport that adds a little bit of this urgency to it not anything necessarily that they're doing or not doing so I have had that on my mind this week.

And I think that's maybe the overriding thing that in the future I think we'll be able to talk about right now this board is set up to punish what is maybe the healthiest way that a team should grow over the course of a year you're punished if you have a flaw early and correct it gradually over the course of a year and I guess you could say that you know teams that are great from day one should be rewarded I get that but I also think that there's times where.

As we've seen in a how state history better teams can sometimes get penalized for having a flaw that gets exposed by the wrong opponent early whereas other teams maybe with more favorable schedule get off the hook.

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