We are less than seven weeks away from the start of the college football season and a little less than eight weeks away from the start of the Ohio State schedule.

Over the coming days and months there will be plenty of content to get you ready for the rapidly approaching season as the Buckeyes look to make it five straight Big Ten Championships and get back to the College Football Playoff for a third consecutive year.

But none of those things are given and you have got to get through your schedule.

Something that people will appreciate more now than ever, after seeing a 2020 season that was in a constant state of flux and at one point, did not appear to even be in the cards.

Schedules are planned out years in advance, sometimes non-conference games sit on the schedule for more than a decade. For 2021 we have had the chance to pour through the schedules for the entire Big Ten, look in-league and out-of-league games and just try to predict who will step into key roles by recently departed players.

It all of course leads up to the first Saturday of December in Indianapolis, as two teams play for the silver football trophy and hopefully a call about 14 hours later for inclusion into the four-team (for now) College Football Playoff tournament.

Without the benefit of fall practice, seeing depth charts and really knowing the answer to a lot of questions, we are making our calls for what the final standings will look like at the end of November as the Big Ten East and the Big Ten West champs will be getting set to meet at Lucas Oil Stadium.

We started earlier today by talking about the Big Ten West and instead of making you wait until Monday, let’s focus on the Big Ten East now.

The East champion has won all seven of the Big Ten Championship Games, five of those wins have been by the Ohio State Buckeyes including the last four straight games. The margin of victory has been more than 17 points but that is largely due to Ohio State’s 59-0 win over Wisconsin in the 2014 games and the margin in Ohio State’s last four champ game appearances has been a slightly lower 13 points.

Will the Buckeyes make it back to Indy for a fifth time in a row and six of the last eight? Wait not longer to find out what we are projecting?

We won’t go into a lot of details here; we have a whole preseason to talk about the upcoming Ohio State schedule and season. It is a schedule that allows the Buckeyes to be tested with a road game at Minnesota to start things off and then followed up by the biggest non-conference game for any league member with Oregon coming to Ohio Stadium. We know all of the questions that will be asked, who will be quarterback, who will step up at linebacker, will the secondary be better, what’s next with the specialists? All of those are valid questions and really could be the thing that differentiates a really good team from being a championship team.

But Ohio State has put that much space between itself and the rest of the league were even with all of those questions, we don’t feel that it is going out on too much of a limb to put the Buckeyes firmly in the Big Ten championship game range. Sure, we were there for the losses against Purdue and Iowa over the past couple of seasons and a trip to Bloomington (Ind.) has a lot of people on edge.

Until we see otherwise, Ohio State will be double-digit favorite in every game, and it seems to fly in the face of logic to pick against them.

The Penn State of the second half of the 2020 season was completely different than the team of the first half, a team that lost on a replay call against Indiana and then got smacked by Ohio State before showing some weak points in the Ohio State defense late to make the score closer than the actual game would have indicated over the full 60-minutes.

The schedule is tough for Penn State out of the gate with a week one game at Wisconsin and a week three game at home against Auburn. We have Penn State dropping both of those games but honestly a win in each of them would not surprise us either.

For stretches of the last season, Penn State could not run the ball but a season-ending injury and a career-ending injury at the position put the Nits in a bad spot and it took time to build a back to the point of being able to run in Big Ten play. Penn State should be able to move the ball better on the ground this season to start, but will the offense be dynamic enough at the start to win two of the three or four toughest games on the schedule?

This is all going to come down to how healthy Michael Penix Jr. can remain at quarterback. This team plays on a different level with Penix in there, but Penix has not been able to play a full season for one reason or another. The Buckeyes know all about the return of Ty Fryfogle and will sell out not to allow the Hoosiers to have some of the pitch-and-catch receptions that saw a multiple score lead evaporate from at Ohio Stadium in 2020. The Hoosiers could not run the ball last season, so they went to the portal to get a new running back with former USC back Stephen Carr.

Indiana is not going to sneak up on anyone, Indiana is not likely going to have that springboard game like it did last season against the Nittany Lions to build all the confidence in the world from. While we are not convinced that Iowa is going to be a great team this year, a trip to Iowa City (Iowa) in week one will have the Hoosiers facing a team that won’t ride highs or lows in the Hawkeyes. In week three, the Hoosiers draw Cincinnati out of the AAC, and you know that the Bearcats would love to put a Big Ten pelt on the wall. Honestly, the first seven games of the Indiana schedule are brutal and we see all four losses coming from there with Iowa, Cincinnati, Penn State and Ohio State all getting past IU before a five-game win streak ends the year along with wins at Michigan (Indiana has not won back-to-back against Michigan since 1958, 59) and Purdue in the Old Oaken Bucket.

What does Jim Harbaugh need record-wise to keep the wolves off his porch? We don’t see that number being hit, regardless of how low the bar is set. We are not going to take a bunch of rivalry pot-shots here, because there really is no need. Michigan has gone out and reshaped its coaching staff once again, Don Brown’s defense is now in Arizona, but it is still a lot of the same players looking to break through in a big game situation.

Michigan wins the games that it is supposed to, most of the time. Michigan does not win the games it is not supposed to, as in any of the time.

A week two game against Washington will be an interesting study and while we have the Huskies winning the game, if Michigan protects its home field and wins that game, the crowing out of Ann Arbor (Mich.) will be deafening as the cries of “being back” will fill the air… right until the Wolverines have to go to Camp Randall to take on Wisconsin. The Badgers have won seven of the last 11 including the last two games in this series, and neither of those games were close. A lot can happen in terms of personnel and fortunes, but we feel pretty confident in saying that game should go to the Badgers.

What then?

The last four games of the schedule include games against Indiana, at Penn State, at Maryland and against Ohio State. We don’t think a whole lot of the Terps in 2021, but the other three games call check in as Michigan losses in our eyes. Losing three of the last four of the seasons to limp into the bowls may be just enough to chase Jim Harbaugh back to the NFL before anyone has the chance to show him the door.

A .500 record is not going to be enough for Greg Schiano as he enters year two with Rutgers, but it is a step in the right direction with a hopeful 12-game schedule and just a disparity between the top members of the league and everyone else. The Scarlet Knights have a very doable non-conference schedule of Temple, Syracuse and Delaware, and then the fun starts with back-to-back games of Michigan and Ohio State. An upset of either is unlikely.

Rutgers had to rely heavily on the transfer portal to get off the mat, but this team is not going to be able to turn any sort of corner until recruiting kicks in and development can take place. Wins against Michigan State, Illinois and Maryland will round of the record at 6-6 but this is not going to be the year that any major upset will happen, but it’s coming, but you may have to wait until 2022 to see that.

The Terps only played five games last season and may be one of the most difficult teams to get a read on. Is this the team that beat Minnesota in overtime and then went on to hand it to Penn State? Is it the team that looked bad against Indiana and lost in overtime to Rutgers? With that being four of the five games from last year, we don’t have a big sample size to pick from. The Terps have no favors being in the B1G East and with likely losses against Ohio State, Penn State (in a normal year) and Indiana already on the ’21 schedule, where do you go from there? A tough non-con game against West Virginia could be a major indicator of what we are looking at. Remember when Maryland beat Texas? Twice.

Tom Herman does, and now he is out of Austin (Texas).

It comes down to defense and in the short season, the Terps were giving up a lot of points. An overnight fix is not there, and we only see wins coming against Howard, Illinois, Kent State and Michigan State.

Mel Tucker should have his first full opportunity this season after whatever 2020 really was. The Spartans won two games that they shouldn’t have, on paper, against Michigan (in Ann Arbor) and against Northwestern (the B1G West winner). But with that came an 11-point loss to Rutgers, a 42-point loss to Iowa and a 24-0 shutout by Indiana.

Are things going to be better this year? Probably not.

A pair of winnable non-conference games are there with Youngstown State and Western Kentucky, but the third non-league game is against the Miami Hurricanes and even if you believe that the Canes are not ready for the national stage, the Spartans are not ready to be the warm-up act.

Add a win against Nebraska, just because this is the type of game that the Huskers drop, and it is a three-win season and start up the basketball talk.