Tressel Third Among Active Coaches
11/19/2009

Ohio State's Jim Tressel is now the third winningest active head coach in all of college football.  His win over Iowa last week was the 227th of his career, which put him one game ahead of Virginia Tech's Frank Beamer.  The only active coaches with more wins than Tressel are legends Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden, both of whom have been coaching more than 40 years and are already in the College Football Hall of Fame.  If a man is judged by the company he keeps, Tressel should be judged pretty darn well.

Despite all his First Team All-Americans, Big Ten championships, and BCS bowls - the most important thing to many Ohio State fans is beating the team up north.  Tressel is 7-1 against Michigan and, with a 2009 squad that has zero players in the top 50 nationally in any statistical category for the first time in years, his ninth effort will exercise his coaching capabilities.

The fewest points allowed in a season by a Tressel-coached Buckeye team is 166.  Both his teams of 2006 and 2007 gave up just that much and both those squads went to the national championship game.  In 11 games in 2009, Tressel's defense has allowed just 136 points, with an average of 12.36 points per game which ranks sixth in the country.  If the defense holds Michigan to less than 30 points Saturday, it would be Tressel's stingiest defense yet.

Heading to Ann Arbor, Tressel is 27-8 in Big Ten road games and in the last road game of the year, he is 6-2.  Since his only loss to Michigan in 2003, Tressel has won five straight.  When he won his fifth consecutive Bit Ten Title last weekend, Tressel joined Woody Hayes as the only other coach in 113 years of Big Ten football to do so.  If he wins Saturday, he would reach a streak that even Woody could never get to - and one that Woody would have dearly cherished.  Six straight wins over Michigan and six straight pairs of golden pants.

Go Bucks!

By Ben Brown, an OSU senior majoring in journalism