so as far as the past few years has Ohio been underachievers as far as what was expected out of them?
'05 Was a 1 loss team, lost to Texas at the Horseshoe with Vince Young tossing a last minute pass to win the game, then rolled through the Big Ten and embarrassed Notre Dame in a BCS Bowl Game. Texas went on to beat USC for the National Title.
'06 was not a good year as far as national opinion goes. We were a pre-season top 5 team, ranked number 1 less than halfway through the season, took out #2 Michigan to end the regular season, then laid an egg against Florida in the title game.
'07 started off with us outside the top 10, then we worked up to #1 around week 8 or 9, then lost to Illinois in the 2nd to last game of the regular season. Dropped back to 4 or 5 to end the regular season, then got into the title game due to everyone in front of us losing after our regular season was over. We weren't supposed to be there in '07, but we wound up there and lost to LSU in a manner that wasn't embarrassing like the year before, but it wasn't really close.
'08 was up in the air. We started off pretty highly ranked, but lost our Heisman candidate running back for 4 games in the first game and he was out for the USC game. In that game, Todd "are those footsteps I hear?" Boeckman was awful. The one bright spot was TP's 52 yards in 10 plays. After that, we spent the season breaking in TP. Yes, we lost to Texas in a BCS bowl game, but we covered the spread easily and took it to the wire. No shame there against a team that many thought should have been playing Florida for the title instead of Oklahoma.
Take away the '06 embarrassment and the national opinion is much different. It doesn't help that the Big Ten hasn't been the strongest BCS conference the last 4-5 years, but it's still better than the ACC, Big East, or Pac 10 (who are they w/o USC?). The other problem is that OSU has the largest alumni base in the country and there are Buckeye's everywhere, ready and willing to shout O...H! which will be responded by an I...O! I personally witnessed the ESPN Zone in the NY-NY casino in Las Vegas get taken over with the cops having to be called for a regular season game against Michigan State back in '06. The level to which the typical Buckeye fan will take their enthusiasm over the top is annoying to most, infuriating to some, so when we look bad, the rest of the country is quick to hate. At the end of the day, we do have 7 National Titles including one in this decade (2002) and 90+ wins for this decade, we aren't that bad.
At the end of the day, the SEC has been getting it done the last few years, so OSU is an easy target for those guys since 2 of their titles came over us.