Tuesday November 19, 2013 year: 133 No. 107
the student voice of
The Ohio State University
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thelantern Meyer: Bowl Championship Series ‘a flawed system’
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ERIC SEGER Sports editor seger.25@osu.edu
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Melting into Columbus
Cleveland-based restaurant Melt Bar and Grilled opened its first Columbus location Friday.
sports
The Ohio State football team has not lost a game since Jan. 2, 2012. The team currently holds the nation’s longest winning streak, and is one win away from setting a school record for consecutive wins with 23. Throughout the whole season, the Buckeyes have been near the top of the rankings, shoving aside their competition in what is unfolding as the second straight undefeated season under coach Urban Meyer. But even with all that success, the coach still doesn’t want to talk about where OSU sits among the country’s best. Meyer sidestepped yet another question about what OSU (10-0, 6-0) looks like compared to the rest of the country and if the fact that the last two times OSU played for the national championship (2007, 2008) it lost has crossed his mind. Instead, he chose to talk about how two running backs, redshirt-freshman Warren Ball and freshman Ezekiel Elliott, need to get better at tackling in order to help the punt team. “Ezekiel on our punt team, I have to teach him how to tackle. Warren Ball is running down on kickoff,”
RITIKA SHAH / Asst. photo editor
OSU coach Urban Meyer talks on the sidelines during a game against Illinois Nov. 16 at Memorial Stadium. OSU won, 60-35. Meyer said Monday during a press conference, to chuckles from the media. “He hasn’t done that in his high school career. We’re going to work hard on that in practice. Any other questions about Warren Ball’s coverage?” One thing Meyer did comment on was the Bowl Championship Series, which is in its final year of selecting
the pair of teams who play for the national title. “Without spending much time on it, because it’s not fair for our team to do that, I will say this: I think it’s a flawed system,” Meyer said. “When you logically think about it, what the BCS people have done, which obviously we’re all part of it, I think it was great for a while.”
The Buckeyes are ranked No. 3 in the BCS for the second week in row, but sit a mere .0013 points ahead of No. 4 Baylor after beating Illinois, 60-35, in Champaign, Ill. A college football playoff system is set to be implemented next season, with a selection committee choosing four of the nation’s top teams to play in a round of semifinals before those two eventual winners meet in a national title game. “I think (the BCS) took an imperfect system and did the best you can without a playoff,” Meyer said. “There’s going to be controversy in playoffs, too … There’s not a 64-team playoff. You’re going to have four guys. What is that fifth team going to feel like?” In the meantime, where OSU is ranked in the BCS or any other poll could be beyond the Buckeyes’ power, something OSU offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Tom Herman said does not cause any discontent. “I don’t think there’s any frustration because I think at the end of the day, it was like last year, everybody said, is there frustration you can’t go to a bowl game? No. We knew we couldn’t go to a bowl game in
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Mirror Lake leak springs $24K investigation JUSTIN CLINE Lantern reporter cline.322@osu.edu
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Hyde runs into new territory
Senior running back Carlos Hyde tied Archie Griffin for 3rd-most yards rushed in an OSU game Saturday
campus SHELBY LUM / Photo editor
Mirror Lake is overflowing and leaking, but some OSU officials said research being done on the issue won’t affect the Mirror Lake jump tradition.
If you filled about two CABS buses with water and dumped them into the sewer on a daily basis, it would be roughly equivalent to what Mirror Lake spills into the local sewer system every day. The cause: the lake’s continuous overflow and a recently discovered leak, said Ohio State spokeswoman for Administration and Planning Lindsay Komlanc. In an effort to follow suit with campus’s ever-evolving sustainability plan and in part to discover the source of the leak, Mirror Lake is set to become subject to a slew of studies by EDGE Group later this month, senior vice president of Administration and Planning Jay Kasey said. EDGE Group is a local firm of landscape architects and development consultants founded by former
OSU football player and assistant vice president for business advancement Eddie George. The firm is set to help address several issues of the campus landmark, including options for fixing the leak, maintenance considerations and alternative sources to fill the lake, said Aparna Dial, director of OSU energy services and sustainability. “It’s filled with drinking water right now, and the water source is Pomerene (Hall),” Dial said. “When we consider sustainability, we want to think about the cost to maintain and operate the lake in addition to looking at a good source — a more sustainable source for replacement — on a day-to-day basis.” Komlanc said in an email OSU will be paying EDGE $24,000 to do the studies. The funds come from the President and Provost’s Council on Sustainability, which considers funding requests each year for various sustainability projects around campus.
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$500K budget cut keeps faculty and staff from new computers DAN HOPE Oller reporter hope.46@osu.edu
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Sniffing out OSU’s essence
A fragrance company works to create scents to represent college campuses, and OSU could be next.
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A quarter of Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff were scheduled to receive new computers this academic year, but when the nearly $500,000 funding was cut, some programs were left scrambling. The college paused its annual Computer Refresh Program, which grants funding to replace 25 percent of full-time faculty and staff members’ computers each year, for the 2014 fiscal year in September. The program had created a four-year refresh cycle for the faculty and staff in each of its departments and schools by providing a yearly financial allocation. With the program paused, that cycle has been pushed back a year. “The decision to pause the program was necessary to address two critical needs,” said John Nisbet, chief administrative officer in the College of Arts and Sciences, in an email to The Lantern. Those critical needs, Nisbet said, were a “major firewall refresh” budgeted at $200,000, and a budget of approximately $204,000 to cover the cost of OSU’s agreements with Microsoft, Adobe and Box. The Computer Refresh Program, which has been run three times since it was established for the 2011 fiscal year, has been funded at $480,000 annually, Nisbet said. In lieu of the program, Nisbet said OSU has set aside funds to respond to “emergency refresh requests,” which are to provide new computers to faculty or staff members who have computers “so outdated it prevent(s) someone from doing their work.” Nisbet did not confirm whether the program will resume for the 2015 fiscal year, but said that is the college’s goal. Dave Alden, senior systems manager for the
Computer Refresh Program put on hold to address two other needs:
• $200K “major firewall refresh” • $204K to cover the cost of OSU’s agreements with Microsoft, Adobe and Box The program grants funding to replace 25 percent of the College of Arts and Sciences full-time faculty and staff members’ computers each year. source: reporting college’s Department of Mathematics, said the pause of the program forced his department to make cuts in other areas of its budget. “There was no way I was willing to not refresh computers this year, because that just puts crappy computers on faculty and staff’s desktops for the next four years,” Alden said. “If you don’t buy them this year, then everybody ends up with a 5-year-old computer over the next three or four years.” Making those budget cuts was difficult, Alden said, in part because the department did not know until September it would not receive the program funding, which he said was “about $22,000” for his department. “We were given very little time to figure out where to cut,” Alden said. The 2013 fiscal year allocation for each department was found by multiplying one-fourth of each department’s staff by a weighted cost of $1,100, calculated from the average market price of Dell and Mac desktop computers. Departments had the choice of using the funds to purchase PC or Mac desktops or laptops, according to the program’s overview flyer for the 2013 fiscal year. Brent Curtiss, computing systems manager for
KAYLA ZAMARY / Design editor the college’s School of Earth Sciences, however, said the impact of the program pause should be “pretty minimal” as long as the pause only lasts one year. “Computers last a long time,” Curtiss said. “We can easily handle a year off without a real noticeable impact. Probably you could handle two years, but beyond that it would be, we’d be back to where we were before (the program started). We were getting by but then we had — it was a little tougher to get them a machine.” The refresh program was developed in 2010, Nisbet said, to address the “difficulty and cost of supporting outdated or non-standard computing equipment” and to ensure all full-time faculty and staff would be able to receive updated computers every four years. Curtiss said the program allowed the school to use its money more efficiently. “It took a burden off our budget for buying computers for faculty and staff,” Curtiss said. “I think it really helps us to be more efficient with the money and with the equipment that’s in place.”
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