Three lessons from No. 8 Ohio State's 26-17 win over No. 7 Oregon in the Rose Bowl.1. The Buckeyes, and Big Ten, have got a serious monkey off their backs. After two straight BCS Championship Game losses and last season's late Texas rally in the Fiesta Bowl, Ohio State finally won its first BCS game since the '06 Fiesta. Of course, it wasn't against the behemoth of the Pac-10 in USC, but it was still the conference's first win in Pasadena since Wisconsin in 2000. The bigger question, though, was it simply a blip or the start of a bigger trend for the Big Ten? An Iowa win in the Orange Bowl against Georgia Tech can only help to drive home a Big Ten uprising.
2. Terrelle Pryor matured before our eyes. This was by far the sophomore quarterback's most impressive performance of a season in which the Buckeye faced weeks of scrutiny and talk that he picked the wrong school. Pryor was 23 of 37 for 266 yards (all season highs) for two touchdowns and an interception and he also ran for 72 yards. Jim Tressel seemed to take the handcuffs off his QB, allowing him to spread things out instead of playing it close to the sweater vest and riding the power run. Of course it was a necessity vs. an Oregon team that was scoring 37 points per game, but you have to wonder if this performance will help Tressel to see just what the offense is capable of when Pryor isn't being asked to reign his innate skills in. Of course the consensus was that OSU would open things up after showing new looks vs. Texas in the Fiesta, but that obviously changed by the time the fall came around.
3. The Pac-10's perceived depth took another blow. The league came in to the bowl season with the Heisman runner-up in Toby Gerhart and seven teams in the postseason, but it ends with a 2-5 record. Outside of the two Los Angeles schools (USC beat Boston College, UCLA beat Temple), the Pac-10 was o-for, with BYU beating Oregon State, Cal losing to Utah, Nebraska blanking Arizona, Oklahoma topping Stanford and then the Ducks' defeat in the Rose. The lesson? Depth isn't necessarily depth when the conference goes 2-3 vs. Top 25 teams and one of those wins was against a struggling Notre Dame team.
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