Tressel on cupcakes

Q: Q. For the coaches, do your kids enjoy playing the Emporia States, the Eastern Washingtons, the MAC schools, the Texas States, or do they want to test themselves and play Jim, you're going to play USC this year. Are those not the games that in addition to your conference games that your kids really want to play and really want to be able to test themselves just for the whole college experience? And I think the fact that we have the system we have now, that just takes away that opportunity because everybody is trying it's a zero sum game. You lose your chances you're not maybe totally eliminated, but it's a pretty good chance that you are.

COACH TRESSEL: I think in our case it's very important for us to have a significant number of home games. That's big. We have 36 sports, as we mentioned, a $110 budget that football raises a considerable amount of. We need home games, so we're not going to get marquee games where they only come to Ohio State.

So our philosophy is to have a marquee out of the area great experience for our players and fans like USC, Texas we just finished with and so forth, have one of those always on the books, and then try to have a lot of home games because we need that to run the comprehensive program that we choose to raise.

So do our players like that? I think they would like playing anyone rather than an open week because open weeks aren't fun. They came to play football, and they know on an open week they're going to practice, and they've had enough practice.

So going to the 12th game I think was a little bit of a burden for the student athlete just from a safety standpoint. How many times can those big bodies run into each other, and we can't prove how that's going to shorten their future careers, but you can only take so many bangs. So it's a little bit of a burden.

But I think our kids are proud of the fact that we needed to do that to run a great Ohio State athletics program, so we need to have that extra revenue, so I think our guys are okay with it.