It is time.

I've been meaning to start an Ohio State football blog for a long time. As a drive-by commenter on various CFB blogs for the last year or so, I've come to know and appreciate understand acknowledge the art personal pastime (like masturbating, but with something less meaningful to show for it at the end) of blogging. So, I'm giving it a shot myself.

Let's get a few things out of the way first: I am an Ohio State football fan, and have been for all of my adult life. Why not all of my life, you ask? Because I was the fat geeky kid in elementary school who got picked on by the Youth Boosters football players for being fat and geeky. I'm not bitter; I deserved it. Were I in their position I can't say with any authority that I would have done any differently. Picking on fat people is funny, damn it. Don't chastise me, you know for three years or moe you've been cracking fat jokes every time Notre Dame, Kansas, Maryland, Toledo, or Tennessee hit the field. Don't be frontin'. Anyway, I was butthurt about the fat jokes as a kid and thus didn't care much for the sport they played. I was young, and that means I was dumb.

Anyway, I became a football fan at the right time: 2001, on the eve of the Greatest Football Season Ever in the History of Sport (Marty Schottenheimer Call It Sport, so I Call It Sport). Sure, we had to watch a second straight heartbreaking loss to an SEC team in the bowl game (ARGH FORESHADOWING ARGH), but we beat Michigan with our backup quarterback we're pulling in the No. 1 guy on the FBI's most wanted list Scout and Rivals' player rankings, and boy oh boy Mike Doss was coming back and something special was brewing.

Fourteen straight coronaries later, Jim Tressel and the ragtag band of overperforming misfits known as Special K and the Silver Bullets were hoisting the trophy at midfield in Tempe, Arizona. I was hooked.

I'd say that I've been with this team through thick and thin, but I have to be brutally candid with you: I've never seen thick. The worst season Ohio State has endured, record-wise, since 2001 is a middling 8-4 season with a young team and an upset win over the Dread Hosts of Lloyd the Deceiver Michigan. When your toughest times are ugly losses in national title games, you've got it pretty good, comparatively. While I hesitate to call this a golden era of Ohio State football, it's something special that relative newcomers like me should appreciate. This blog will do all it can to do just that, hopefully with humor, candor, and a realistic perspective on the Best Damn Football Team in the Land.