Buckeyes take in the sights of SoCal and prepare for Rose Bowl

Rose Bowl rundown

After arriving in California just a few days ago, Ohio State has been busy, going through several practices, gathering for fancy dinners, and even walking the red carpet. It can be a bit difficult to track everything the Buckeyes are up to, so for the sake of your time, we’ve gone out and collected everything you need to see from today’s festivities. No need to thank us.

The biggest news of the day (at least in terms of how many reporters felt the need to tweet it) may have been the guest appearance made by former Buckeye Nick Bosa. Bosa has been training in Southern California for several months now, likely to be near his brother (Joey plays for the Chargers), and decided to pop in to see his old coaches and teammates today.

In case you were wondering, there seem to be no hard feelings between Bosa and his teammates for how his season ended, at least if this tweet is any indication.

Bosa’s appearance wasn’t the only news of the day though, there was also some injury related content.

No official statements have been made about Mack, Prince or Munford, though it’s been rumored that Munford was a banged up a bit earlier in the week. I don’t expect anything serious happened though, and both him and Prince should be good to go in the Rose Bowl.

While most of the talk this week is about the football game between Washington and Ohio State, we have some interesting off the field news too, as “researchers at the two universities have collaborated to create proteins that zip together in much the same way DNA molecules zip up to form a double helix” per OSU News contributor Denise Blough.

I’m nowhere near smart enough to know what that means, but the article is very neat and seems to be good news for the sake of humanity.

“The way Schiano talked Thursday, it doesn’t sound like he’ll return as Ohio State’s defensive coordinator in the new staff under incoming head coach Ryan Day.”

- Doug Lesmerises, Cleveland dot com

Greg Schiano has been a hot topic of discussion recently. We wrote an article about him yesterday, as did just about every other media outlet (ours is the best though), and have talked about him ad nauseum all season long, as Ohio State’s defense stumbled through conference play and gave up 49 points to a team currently losing to Auburn by 49 points at the time of writing.

While his quotes have been covered pretty extensively, as I said, I think Doug’s column is still worth a look, because he shares some pretty good nuggets of information and some solid #takes. Before moving on from this one, and hopefully having a new defensive coordinator to talk about next season, I want to take one last shot at Greg Schiano, using only statistics.

In Bill Connelly’s S&P+ ratings, Ohio State’s defense was roughly as good as Missouri’s this season. Missouri gave up 37 points to a Will Muschamp coached team.

“The No. 7/5-ranked Ohio State men’s hockey team returns to action with a nonconference series vs. Mercyhurst this weekend. The Buckeyes (9-4-3, 4-2-2-2 B1G) and Lakers (8-8-2, 6-5-1 AHA) will meet at 7 p.m. Friday and 8 p.m. ET Saturday in Value City Arena in Columbus.”

- Ohio State Buckeyes dot com

If you need some Buckeye action to keep you distracted this weekend, outside of the men and women’s basketball games, you could check out one of the nation’s best hockey teams in their two game series with Mercyhurst on Friday and Saturday.

After nearly a month off after their two overtime ties with Minnesota on November 30th and December 1st, the Buckeyes are back for what should be a very winnable series and a break from conference play. Mercyhurst is decent, coming in at 8-8-2, but Ohio State should be able to grab two wins before jumping back into conference play next weekend against Michigan State.

Stick to sports

• The new Black Mirror episode weirds me out.
• Best Youtube video essays of 2018.
• Rest in peace Sears.