People are idiots.
Cardale Jones had one of the greatest QB careers in OSU history. 11-0 with a NC? Who can look down their nose at that? Not Troy Smith. Not Braxton Miller. Not JT Barrett. Not Haskins, nor Fields, nor Krenzel, nor Hoying, nor Schlichter, nor... well you get the idea.
Does anyone really think they lose to MSU's backup QB with Jones behind center? Really? What evidence do you base that on?
Yet all we heard was how JT is this "great leader" while Cardale Jones had "character issues" even though JT Barrett was getting DUIs and having domestic instances involving police, while the worst thing that Cardale did was say that homework sucks while he was a freshman.
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And no, FTR I don't think that Fro actually gives a crap about JT Barrett. He is just a troll that likes to stir chit up. Best to talk around him rather than to him, imo. But instead people will predictably engage him for pages and pages on end, while the moron masterbates.
So, to the bolded part, the evidence is that he wasn't very good that year? Like really, he wasn't. I get that he was 11-0, but Barrett was 38-6, and people tell me that's nothing special. If Jones had been allowed to keep playing so-so ball and they lose somewhere, we'd get to hear about how there was a top-5 Heisman finisher languishing on the bench. Jones just had not been very good that year, MSU had a very good defense and Zeke was a damn mess the week before that game. (Also, there's no real way that "evidence" can be used in a game that didn't happen. It's all speculation, which tends to take on the tone and feelings of what we want)
So, I actually don't think OAM is trolling (well, at one point he wasn't, it's kinda degraded at this point) because he and OSU fans are engaging in a sort of classic sports debate between fans of a team and observers. Outsiders by and large see players for what they are and fans at times see them for what they are not (and then often build out a logical structure around that). Outsiders say "JT set all the record and led lots of very good teams/teams that did what very good teams do." OSU fans explain, no, we should've been better, but this record-setting player was simply not good enough, and the baseline is at worst record-setting players as good as him. It's not a level of entitlement, but a sort of ever-present expectation to be a little bit better.
And it happens with most fanbases. I've seen fans of a productive but inconsistent QB lament that the backup they bitched about ever signing didn't take over the job after one solid-isn start. In the moment, and after, you always believe you should've been a bit better, and perhaps if this guy had been better, you would've gotten there. It's just kind of a classic discussion. I mean, if I say on this board "JT Barrett was a pretty good offensive player and a great Buckeye" people get PISSED and we get in big fights. Literally saying a record-setting Buckeye was very good is considered trolling.
(A good example of this is the benching of Jones vs the benching of Hurts. Benching a 26-1 starter is considered a moment of genius, in part because it worked and in part because it's a drive-by fact. If someone doesn't blow a coverage, they probably lose that game because of a bad sack he took, and there's no myth there. Benching Jones was a move that took some chutzpah and certianly not sticking with the status quo, but it didn't end in a title and gets stacked
down the line with the rest of the Barrett complex)
