COLUMBUS, Ohio – Even with the nation’s longest winning streak, the Buckeyes do not control their own destiny in the race for a berth in the national college football championship game.
Ohio State (7-0) is ranked fourth in the first BCS standings of the season, behind Alabama, Florida State and Oregon, which led OSU by a sizeable margin. The Crimson Tide, Seminoles and Ducks are also undefeated.
Polls and ranking are something Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer wishes his players could ignore.
“Where we want to go, it’s to beat Penn State next week. And our focus — I wish I had our guys living on a desert island, ‘cause I don’t want to hear anything else except to go win number eight,” he said after Saturday’s 34-24 win over Iowa.
Florida State is coming off its biggest win of the season, a 51-14 victory at previously unbeaten Clemson.
The Ducks have only played one team that was ranked at the time, but could get a boost in the next two weeks with games against UCLA and at Stanford. Or, they could suffer at least one loss, which might help Urban Meyer’s team.
Ohio State is followed by Missouri in the standings released Sunday night.
The Buckeyes have all kinds of streaks going, not the least of which is Meyer’s own. He is one of 41 known head coaches to guide a major-college team to a winning streak of at least 20 games and one of only nine to have at least two such win streaks of at least 20 games.
Meyer won his last game as coach at Florida and is 19-0 at Ohio State. He is still a bit short of the 22-game streak he put together at Florida in 2008 and 2009). His other 20-game string was established at Utah (2003-04) and Florida (2005).
The Buckeyes, meanwhile, have also won three tight games in a row, the last two of which had to be won after Ohio State fell behind on the scoreboard.
Their three Big Ten wins are by seven points, 10 (with a last-second touchdown) and 10 — and that’s not enough to convert poll-voting doubters or the computers that analyze teams in the Bowl Championship Series.
Next up is another home game against Penn State (4-2, 1-1) on Saturday.