Don't say anything

Cincinnati won't be putting anything on Ohio State's bulletin board this week, because Bearcats coach Luke Fickell has muzzled his players in advance of kickoff

Luke Fickell started 50 games as Ohio State's nose tackle during his playing days, so he was a very important player in the Buckeyes' success.

He just wasn't a very quotable player.

Fickell left the talking to a pair of his more loquacious teammates and buddies on the defensive line, Mike Vrabel and Matt Finkes.

But that isn't the reason Fickell has taken his Cincinnati players out of the interview rotation this week.

It's a move that shows Fickell is much more like the first Ohio State coach he worked under -- Jim Tressel -- than the second -- Urban Meyer.

Meyer didn't see skeletons around every corner. He figured if a player talked bit, it put more pressure on him to perform on Saturday. And, since everything was a competition to Meyer, the more pressure on a player, the better.

Tressel was, and Fickell is, much more careful.

And so, ostensibly to keep his players from answering endless questions about his return to Columbus, where he coached from 2002 until 2016, including a one-year stint as interim head coach in 2011, Fickell has hit the mute button.

What's more likely is, he doesn't want his players saying anything inflammatory about their chances of ending a 48-game Ohio State winning streak against in-state opponents dating to 1921.

Things are going to be tough enough for UC, which is 2-6 all-time against Ohio State, with the last win coming in 1897.

The most-recent game in the series came in 2014, when Gunner Kiel fired four touchdown passes and had UC within 33-28 in the third quarter before the Buckeyes scored the final 17 points in a 50-28 win.

That OSU team, under Urban Meyer, went on to win the national championship.

Coincidentally, in Ohio State's 2002 national championship season, Cincinnati gave the Buckeyes all they wanted in Week 4. Only two dropped TD passes in the OSU end zone in the last minute preserved a 27-22 win that would have ended that season's magic long before it got started.

Fickell, Ohio State's defensive coordinator from 2005-2016, knows his defense faces a tall task in containing Georgia transfer Justin Fields and a Buckeyes' offense that scored four touchdowns on the first 13 plays in a 45-21 win over Florida Atlantic.

"We've got our hands full," Fickell said. "I think the thing that you saw from them on Saturday, it was over before it started in a lot of ways. But I think they were pretty vanilla in a lot of things defensively. They didn't have to do a bunch offensively. I don't know that they had to throw a lot of things at them. But you saw them be very efficient, very explosive, obviously up 21-0 I think in three or four minutes."