A New Dawn For Ohio State, Russia

As a Buckeye alum, I was, of course, devastated when Ohio State lost to Illinois two weeks ago, especially since the subsequent victory in Ann Arbor meant it potentially cost them a shot at the National Championship Game.

But now, I'm good, because I have a you-heard-it-hear-first-prediction. Ohio State will indeed be playing in the title game.

They currently lay fifth in the BCS standings, but two of those teams, Kansas and Missouri, play each other, so OSU is as good as fourth. That means they need to climb two more spaces to make it into the game, so two losses by the teams ahead of them.

One of the teams to try to leapfrog will be the winner of the KU/Mizzou game, which will have to beat the Big 12 South champion, likely Oklahoma, in the Big 12 title game. Oklahoma beat Missouri earlier this year and will be favored against either team if Sam Bradford and DeMarco Murray are healthy by then.

Then there's LSU. They have Arkansas at home, which is a rivalry game, and then the SEC Championship. If it's against Georgia, it stands to be a de facto road game for the Tigers.

Finally, West Virginia. They also have two games left, both at home. One is against UConn, whom they are tied with for the Big East lead, and arch-rival Pitt.

Still, you have to like the elite teams to win these games, and not the hopeful underdogs. But the factor that gives me the most confidence is the x-factor. By now, everyone has seen the stat that a top-five team has lost to an unranked opponent this year 11 times. Teams are getting knocked off by others that aren't even very good. And except for Pitt, every opponent left for the teams ahead of Ohio State has at least 25 votes in the coach's poll. Ohio State will be in New Orleans in January, mark it.

While I'm foretelling of good fortune for the Buckeyes, it's a much gloomier picture in England, where the men's soccer team needed only to beat Croatia at home to qualify for Euro 2008 on the last day of qualifying. Sure, Croatia is good, but they had already clinched qualification and had not yet played in Wembley Stadium against the the best team in the qualifying group (on paper).

Croatia went up 2-0 early and held that lead at half-time, but England drew even with two goals 11 minutes apart in the second half. This sent a surge of cheer throughout the whole country, as England needed only a draw to qualify.

Alas, Croatia regained the lead 13 minutes from full-time, and that was that. This will be the first time a "home nation" (the countries that comprise the United Kingdom, plus Ireland) will not be represented at the Euro since 1984. FYI, the last time a World Cup was held without a home nation was 1938, and only because England declined an invitation.

UEFA, the sport's governing body in Europe, has a nice system for drawing teams into qualifying groups. They look at results from the last round of Euro qualifying and the last round of World Cup qualifying, and then break them off into pots. Teams that did the best went into Pot A, the second best into Pot B, and so on.

With 14 spots in Euro 2008 up for grabs (two teams — co-hosts Austria and Switzerland — qualify automatically), the Nations of Europe were split into seven pots of seven (Pot 7, the weakest, had eight). Each group gets a random team from each pot, and in theory, this creates groups pretty even with one another, with all the strong, mediocre, and weak teams evenly distributed.

Their formula for determining which team belongs in which pot, as explained, received a pretty strong endorsement today. Of the 14 teams in the top two pots, 13 qualified. And again, only 14 spots were even available.

England, as you might have surmised, was the unlucky exception. They were in Pot A. Croatia was in Pot B.

So who was the lone qualifier not in the top two pots, the benefactor of England's stumble?

They are probably still celebrating and slamming the house beer in Kruzhka, and Ivan Drago would be happy, if he were real.

The Russian team contains no real superstars, and only has a handful of players who play outside of Russia. The face of the team probably belongs to Dutch manager Guus Hiddink, who has led both Korea and Holland to World Cup semifinals, and Australia to their first World Cup in 32 years, where they too advanced out of the group stage.

Given his history to lift teams to heights never before reached, Russia has an excellent chance to get beyond the group stage of a major competition for the first time since the dissolution of the USSR. Being a betting man, I intend to capitalize on that. There's no reason not to put $20 bucks on Russia to take the title at 34-to-1 (currently).

A lot will depend on the draw, where once again, the 16 teams are divided into four pots. They are naturally in the weakest pot. Best case scenario would see them in a group with Austria, Sweden, and Romania. Worst case scenario would be Holland, Italy, and Germany. Incidentally, thanks to a lot of draws in World Cup '06 qualifying, France is also in the worst pot, which means it will be possible for one of the Euro 2008 groups to be Italy, France, Germany, and Holland. That would be the group of death to end all groups of death.

So let's break out the shchi and the sbiten, and celebrate the beauty of Miss Atom. I've found my latest team to get behind.

NOTE: I submitted this story, and then sauntered over to the main page to see what was new. What's new is, Adam Russell has a column up where he makes many of the exact same points that I did about Ohio State. Hand to heart, we did not collaborate and I did not read his piece before writing mine, although I see now he's obviously a genius.