The Week That Was in Ohio Football

It was a wild and crazy week in the world of sports, but I believe that just from the sheer quantity of posts on the site, a lot of the attention was on the gridiron. Between the final week of the preseason for the Browns, the roster deadline, the Buckeyes season opener and some fun in the college football world, it was an awesome week to be a football fan. I know we have yet to recap the Buckeyes game officially, but this post serves to recap what just happened entirely in football during this past week to see where we are today.

Around the state at the collegiate level, we first had Kent State and Bowling Green each securing relatively easy first victories against simple opponents on Thursday night. The Buckeyes then survived against the pesky Naval Academy yesterday by the final score of 31-27 while the MAC had a rough day as Akron got blown-out by Penn State, Purdue routed Toledo and Ohio lost to Connecticut. Overall, it was a pretty cool first full day of the college football season yesterday with all of the top 25 games along with Sam Bradford’s injury against BYU, and there were no exceptions in Ohio as well.

The college football scene was not the only football activity yesterday as the Browns trimmed their roster down to 52 (not 53 for some reason) without having to release suspected casualty RB Jamal Lewis. I feel much more comfortable about our offense this season with having a veteran like Lewis on roster as opposed to only having James Davis and the injured Jerome Harrison. I am sure that others on staff will have similar thoughts of this, and we will all have more ideas for the beginning of the regular season next weekend. Just to recap and set up for hopefully some hard-core analysis tomorrow of the Buckeyes game yesterday and some more Browns articles, here is a look at the day-by-day football breakdown for the past week:

Sunday: Craig helped to recap what seemed to be a promising victory over the Tennessee Titans last weekend. Anyone would love to beat the top regular season team in the AFC in the preseason…. Sure means a lot in trying to win over four games this year.

Monday: All things went crazy as we first learned of the release of Rod Hood, and then word spread by the end of the day that the Brownies had also cut ties with Ryan Tucker. Craig also did his usual thing with recapping what occurred during the weekend with the rest of the AFC North.

Tuesday: In a continuation of some fine Browns coverage, Craig detailed what has happened to the running game over the preseason. We also had Scott here work on a piece about who could be off the team when the rosters fall back down to 53 players.

Wednesday: I guess the excitement of the Jamal Lewis rumors got everyone out from under their football shells as we first had Scott introduce the rumors about the former Raven being released. On the site, we also had Denny with a feature about the Big Ten’s lack of respect in NCAA and TD jumped out of his baseball identity in analyzing Peter King’s prediction for the Browns.

Thursday: It was an up and down day for the Lerner’s in the blog-o-sphere as first, we heard that Cleveland is worth over $1 billion, and more than the Pittsburgh Steelers. All good things must come to an end however, as Lerner was then promptly announced to be 28th among league owners. We also had the final preseason game against the Chicago Bears with the typical WFNY preview and open thread. RockKing also wrote a rock-tastic preview for what turned out to be an epic Navy and Ohio State game.

Friday: Rick outlined his thoughts from the final preseason game against the Bears (not so optimistic compared to that Titans win, eh). We also had chaos from all around with recurring Derek Anderson trade rumors and some harsh comments from former Brownie Rod Hood. I also loved the Scout.com article mentioned in While We’re Waiting as it had the top tier of the 2010 NFL Mock Draft with Taylor “I have the best name in sports” Mays at the top of the board.

(The top greeting card is via this neat greeting cards blog and the Browns photo of Brady Quinn at the Titans game is via Tony Dejak/AP.)