Keith Langlois

Pick a college. Call it State U. And let’s say State U. had a terrific season in 2005, winning 10 games and routing Notre Dame in a BCS bowl. State U’s only losses were to the eventual national champion by a field goal and to the Big Ten champion by a touchdown on the road.

But then the NFL draft happened and State U. got wiped out. Obliterated. Nine players drafted, an astounding five in the first round. Nine defensive starters gone.

A bleak season ahead for State U., right?

Well, maybe for State U. But not for Ohio State U. Ahem — The Ohio State University.

It says many things that Ohio State was voted No. 1 in both the Associated Press and the coaches preseason polls, but mostly what it says is this: Jim Tressel has mined Ohio State’s enormous potential like no one since Woody Hayes.

The evidence of the aura Tressel has spun from whole cloth doesn’t get much more graphic than his peers’ and the media's validation of his program after incurring the cataclysmic losses Ohio State experienced in the wake of their 10-2 season that ended with the Fiesta Bowl rout of a very hot Notre Dame team.

Coaches know better than anyone the improbability of replacing nine starters from any unit and not experiencing a dramatic dropoff in performance, let alone a unit as star-strewn as the one that’s now missing the likes of A.J. Hawk, Bobby Carpenter and Donte Whitner, all taken within the NFL draft’s top 18 picks.

But what they’re saying by making the Buckeyes a solid No. 1 over Texas, Southern California and the usual suspects is that Tressel has a stable of bristling athletes waiting to fill the many voids and that he knows how to coach them a little, too.

And that’s pretty much all it takes to manufacture football success in Columbus, Ohio.

In fact, the upset bigger than Ohio State earning preseason No. 1 status despite its losses is that the Buckeyes were dormant so long, given the breadth of their resources.

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Start with the premise that football is God in Columbus, because it is. Ohio State football success is more integral to the quality of life throughout Ohio than Penn State football success matters to Pennsylvanians and far bigger than Michigan football success to Michiganders.

In the facilities arms race, Ohio State is No. 1 the way Castro is No. 1 in Cuba. The Buckeyes are No. 1 in a manner so as to render meaningless No. 2.

They’ve spent or committed a half-billion dollars to their athletic facilities in Columbus over the past decade or so and have an NBA-worthy arena, an expanded and updated Ohio Stadium, a football practice facility the size of a 747 hangar and state-of-the-art playing fields for non-revenue sports to show for it.

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Spend that kind of cash and there’s one inevitable conclusion: Everybody is committed to ensuring athletic success. Because the cost of failure becomes prohibitive.

You can argue that such largesse for athletics is a shameful case of the tail wagging the dog, but if you’re Michigan or Penn State or Iowa, what do you do about it? Pony up or lag behind. And there’s a lot of lagging behind going on in the Big Ten these days.