COLUMBUS — Saturday night’s 8:12 p.m. kickoff for Ohio State’s football game against Penn State was the third year in a row this annual match-up has been a night game.
The Ohio State-Penn State game has started before 3:30 p.m. only once in the last 11 seasons.
Between 1999 and 2004, it kicked off four times at noon but those days appear to be long gone.
WEARING BLACK: Ohio State’s all-black uniforms marked the sixth time the Buckeyes have worn “alternative” uniforms in a game but the first time that either scarlet or white was not a dominant color.
Fans were also asked to wear black and a conservative estimate would be that around 70 percent of the crowd appeared to go along with that suggestion.
LEG INJURY: Senior linebacker Joshua Perry was injured on the second play of the game. After appearing to limp and favor his right leg he was taken to the locker room on a golf cart. He was replaced by Dante Booker.
INCREDIBLE BRAXTON MOMENT: Braxton Miller has said his 1-yard run in a 35-23 win at Penn State in 2012 might be his favorite move of his college career.
The play started at Penn State’s 1-yard line and was designed to be a simple handoff to running back Carlos Hyde but a Penn State defender was in Hyde’s face. So Miller improvised and improvised brilliantly.
Miller started to go toward the end zone, stepped back, made a defender miss and then dived into the end zone.
“I saw Carlos was getting blown up so I tried to pick up the slack,” Miller said last week. “It was supposed to go to him. I wasn’t supposed to pull it. I was just trying to get into the end zone. It was crazy.”
OSU-PENN STATE SERIES: Going into Saturday night’s game, Ohio State led its series with Penn State 15-7 since the Nittany Lions entered the Big Ten in 1993 as the conference’s eleventh team.
OSU was 9-2 at Ohio Stadium and 6-5 at Beaver Stadium.
