COLUMBUS, Ohio - The Buckeyes have made it to the second open week without stumbling and now there are just four regular season games between them and a spot in the Big Ten Championship Game and a chance not only to defend their back-to-back conference crown but to kick down the door of the playoff committee and force their way in and not allow "interpretation" to determine who gets in and who is left out, as they have been Big Ten Champs for the last two years only to be left out of the field of four.

Undefeated seasons don't happen all the time around these parts, the Buckeyes went undefeated in 2012 but also could not play in the league title game or a bowl game as part of a NCAA penalty. It has been a long time since 2002 and the last undefeated that included a postseason.

This Ohio State team could be on the verge of something special, but then again even with just four regular season games left, a perfect season would require seven more wins, almost as many games as the Buckeyes have in hand at 8-0 at this current moment.

In this week's edition of the 3-2-1 presented by Hague Water Conditioning, we talk about a team that could be on the verge of something special and much more as the Buckeyes spend this week getting healthy before the four-game sprint to the end gets underway.

1- This is shaping up to be a special team

The first eight games have had plenty of highs and very few lows for the Buckeyes in this 2019-20 season with a perfect 8-0 record, three legitimate Heisman Trophy candidate and a lot of the usual skeptics of the Ohio State program on board believing that this is in fact the nation's No. 1 team.

Now, none of the rankings now mean anything when it comes down to picking the final four for the College Football Playoff. The first rankings don't mean anything either when they come out in early November (more on those later).

For now it is all just conjecture as there are four teams that all have a pretty solid case for why they should be No. 1 in the nation and why everyone else around them is not worthy for that distinction.

The Buckeyes know all-too-well what happens if you take your eye of the prize, even if only for a moment. Purdue and Iowa are still bad words around these parts and unless the Buckeyes trip up against Rutgers on the road in a couple of weeks, the pattern of falling on the road in a 'trap game' streak will end at two and maybe people can get on with their lives when it comes to talking about Ohio State's fortunes as of late.

That does not mean that there are not going to be real challenges with Penn State and Michigan to end the season. That is going to be some of the toughest football that the Buckeyes will have to play in a small window. Those eight quarters likely will be tougher than the four quarters that will follow it up, if the Buckeyes get through it all unscathed, in the Big Ten Championship game, against either Wisconsin (again) or Minnesota.

As we mentioned earlier, the last time that the Buckeyes ran the table through a regular and postseason was the 2002 National Championship year under Jim Tressel. It almost seems like a lifetime ago with the amount of success that Ohio State has enjoyed since the start of the Tressel-era despite only bringing home two national championships during that timeframe. This still has to be considered the Golden Age of Ohio State Football however as the transitions from Tressel to Urban Meyer to Ryan Day have all built upon the success from one to another.

This 2019 team may end up at some heights that the 2002 team was not able to reach. The first plateau would be that elusive 15th win in a season. That was not part of the equation in 2002 when the make up of the schedule did not have a two-round playoff as well as a league title game but still did have a 13th regular season game.

That 2002 team had seven games determined by just one score along the way while this 2019 team has not had any opponent get closer than 21 points to them. That 2002 team had a defense that did it with defense much of the way and had enough offense to fight out of some tough corners. This 2019 team is scoring better than 48 points per game while allowing just a tick less than eight per game.

Yes, we are not looking at equal numbers right now as that 2002 team play four ranked teams in its last six games while this current team might still have five ranked games down the stretch with Penn State, Michigan, B1G Champ Game as well as two rounds of the playoffs. And while the level of competition going up surely will cut into the talent gap that the Buckeyes have enjoyed this year, it does not stop us from looking at the current team's numbers versus what the Buckeyes looked like in some key categories during that magical championship run (and for the fun of it, let's throw in 2014-15 as well).

Just as a reminder, not only are we talking about the 2014-15 and 2002-03 teams playing 14 or 15 games, the game itself certainly has changed in many ways over the past 20 years, so it is not an apples-to-apples comparison, by any stretch.

We of course had to throw in the net punting number as an homage to Jim Tressel, because why wouldn't we?

2 - Dobbins is getting better with age

Everyone was pining at the start of the season for JK Dobbins to return to his freshman form after a relatively disappointing sophomore campaign.

He never needed to take a step backward to 2017, he needed to take a step forward into 2019.

He has done that and then some.

Dobbins' YPC for 2019 may still be a little behind the 7.5 YPC that he was putting up in 2017 but he is also not splitting carries in 2019, a season where he is sitting right at 7.2 YPC.

For what it is worth, the coaches have done a very good job in limiting his carries to a manageable number, never going north of 24 carries this season. Of course that is aided by playing on a team that has been up by 17 points in seven of eight games by halftime and a team that has a margin of victory of 21-plus points throughout the season.

Dobbins has already matched his career high for touchdowns in a season with nine and still has at least five games to go this year and potentially as many as seven.

His six 100-yard games this season also matches his career high of six in the 2017 season and there is a lot of football left to be played.

The next four games will be a mixed bag in terms of rush defenses with Rutgers near the bottom of the nation at 104, Penn State right at the top at No. 2 and then Maryland (56) and Michigan (20) round out the slate.

Granted, Michigan State and Wisconsin both boasted killer defenses as well and Dobbins went for 172 and 163 yards respectively.

No, there is no need any longer to be looking back to 2017 as any sort of benchmark for what Dobbins 'could be'. What we are seeing now in 2019 is what Dobbins will be remembered for and there are a lot of pages left to be written this season.

3 - There is still room for improvement

Before anyone goes and makes it sound like this football team is playing perfectly, we saw some mistakes in the most recent game to remind everyone that no team plays a perfect game and this Ohio State team is not immune to mistakes as well.

A blocked punt led to Wisconsin's only points of the afternoon when Drue Chrisman had to go to his right to get a snap that was not 'in the window' and that forced him to run right into the Wisconsin pressure and ended up leading to a 13-yard punt and a short field that started at the Ohio State 23-yard-line.

Go back to the first series of the game and Justin Fields was sacked on 2nd-and-nine after some confusion with the snap count and Josh Myers snapped the ball before most of the team was ready and the Badgers were on top of things and got to Fields before most players got out of their stances.

A snap going through Fields hands and forcing the Ohio State quarterback to just fall on it also hampered another drive and the list goes on. If you got one of the coaches to be really candid with you, we are sure he could give you 20 minutes worth of individual instances that did not go as plan or up to expectations.

Then again, that is why 35 players or more don't sit down at the champion's dinner each week because it is not easy to grade out as a winner.

But instead of looking at this as a negative, look at it through a wider lens. You don't want to be playing your best ball in October. While you need to win the games in October to make the games in November to mean more and it just builds from there, there is plenty of room for improvement along the way and while this game had the unique parameter of weather hanging over it, there is not a single player on this team that will tell you that he played an A-plus game, maybe outside of an effort like Chase Young, and we promise you he will remember the one or two that 'got away' more than the four that did not.

You have to like that hunger and it is important for this team to stay hungry with so much more left on the table.

1- Who programmed the B1G computer anyways?

Gene Smith and the Buckeyes might need to check the Big Ten scheduling computer for malware after it played the sick joke of putting Penn State and Michigan back-to-back to close out the season.

Clemson closes out with Wake Forest and South Carolina, an actual stretch of two teams with a pulse, but far from what the Buckeyes end up with. The Oklahoma Sooners have TCU and Oklahoma State (though we should maybe be talking about Baylor as the lone undefeated, which has Texas and Kansas) while the top-two teams in the SEC have their usual late November lay-up with Alabama playing Western Carolina and then Auburn while LSU attempts to play two league foes but Arkansas may as well be The Citadel this year before the Tigers then play Texas A&M.

With only a 12-game schedule, sometimes it is tough not to have some difficult stretches on the schedule but it almost seems as if the level of difficulty has been set to expert for the Buckeyes.

In 2020, Ohio State does not end the season with that kind of run but does have a four-game stretch of Iowa, Michigan State, Penn State and then Nebraska. In 2021, we see the same Penn State/Michigan ender to the season. Then in 2022, the Buckeyes don't have to deal with that again and just have a Michigan State/Penn State run and that is followed up in 2023 with Penn State and then Wisconsin.

While nobody is asking the Big Ten to try and protect the Buckeyes (despite opposing fans believing for years that conference officials have been told to look the other way during games on calls) it certainly does not appear that the computer is doing Ohio State and favors, on top of being a league that plays nine conference games, no FCS games and just wants to be ahead of a curve that many leagues will not follow.

There probably is no good answer out there right now, but it does make you question how things get set up in this league at times.

2 - What is Chris Holtmann's team going to look like this year?

The men's basketball season gets going this week, well at least for an exhibition game against Cedarville. The opponent is not all that important but expectations are high for the Buckeyes this season as they are picked near the top of the Big Ten and are in the 'teens' of the preseason national polls.

A talented freshman class along with CJ Walker coming off of his transfer sit-out season will give this team a new look to go along with some familiar faces like Kaleb Wesson, Andre Wesson and Luther Muhammad to name just a few players.

Look for the Buckeyes to try a lot of different looks along the way as there is no real warmup to the season with the games that count coming quickly with a season opener against Cincinnati coming up next week. That win over UC really helped the 2018-19 Buckeyes propel themselves into the NCAA Tournament and spoiled the grand opening of UC's refurbished arena. You know the Bearcats are going to have bad intentions on their minds and the Buckeyes are going to need to get off to a good start.

While we might not learn volumes about this team with the exhibition game, it still will be a first chance to see many of these players go in live action for the first time and look for us to have more things that we learned next week after getting this opportunity to check things out.

Nobody is quite sure what the group in Grapevine (Texas) is going to do when the first CFP rankings come out on November 5th. A constantly rotating group of deciders along with no clear charter in terms of what these people are looking at always has everyone guessing what is important and what is not.

A look at the computer rankings shows that this is really going to be a race between Ohio State and LSU when it comes to the first set of rankings. Clemson is pretty constant at No. 3 in most of the rankings with their non-schedule by way of playing in a bad ACC (outside of themselves) and several of the computers don't even have Alabama in the top-four, instead giving love to Ohio State, a team that the Buckeyes still have a date with in late-November.

No, we tend to think that Ohio State will get the nod as the No. 1 team in the initial rankings that will come out and create a firestorm among football fans.

In the first five rankings debuts, the SEC has had the No. 1 team four of those five times with Mississippi State, Alabama and Georgia all taking that top spot at least once. The only outlier was Clemson in 2015. The last five years, the team that was the initial No. 1 has never won the national title, but in four of the five years the team that debuted at No. 1 did make the playoffs and in three of those years, the team that debuted at No. 1 ended the rankings period still in the No. 1 spot.

There will be a lot of history there but the Buckeyes know a thing or two about making history as the first ever CFP Champions and also debuting at No. 16 in the year that they won it all, only to climb into that No. 4 spot and shock the world.