By JON SPENCER (NewarkAdvocate.com) —
The Terrelle Train is taking on passengers faster than the Titanic took on water.
Thanks to Saturday’s late heroics at Wisconsin, in front of a national TV audience, college football pundits and couch potatoes from Altoona to Yuma can bear witness to this unsinkable vibe cast by true freshman Terrelle Pryor. If Ohio State’s precocious first-year quarterback isn’t king of the world yet, he soon will be.

Or so suggests Gregg Doyel, columnist for CBSSports.com, and Teddy Greenstein, college football reporter for the Chicago Tribune.

According to Greenstein, the Buckeyes now flaunt the Big Ten’s best quarterback-running back combo in Pryor and Chris Wells. It’s the hottest two-week marriage since Britney Spears and … who’s she with now?

“He can’t legally order a beer for nearly two more years,” Greenstein wrote, “but Terrelle Pryor is a man. If he wasn’t before his clutch performance Saturday night at Wisconsin, he is now.”

Doyel’s words were stronger than any drink Pryor isn’t old enough to down.

“When he becomes a man, it’s over … maybe it’s already over,” Doyel wrote. “This is a cold stone fact and it is directed to anyone and everyone with plans of beating the Buckeyes. Beat them now. Beat them now before Terrelle Pryor decides it’s too late.”

Forget Saturday’s home game with Purdue. That’s a gimme. If the Buckeyes can contain Heisman hopeful Jevon Ringer and beat Michigan State next week in East Lansing, then come home and beat Penn State, currently No. 6, it will be time to affix an asterisk next to that blowout loss at USC.

Perhaps that time already has arrived.

Spare me the numbers that show Ohio State with the 105th-ranked passing attack and the 81st-ranked total offense. With Pryor and Wells working in tandem, this clearly is a different team than the one that left the L.A. Coliseum in its skivvies.

I’m not the only one sipping that fruity drink.

Arthur Staple, a columnist for Newsday in New York, predicts Ohio State and USC, on the mend from a loss to unranked Oregon State, will meet again before convening next September in Columbus. Would you believe the national championship game?

Working for USC is a favorable schedule. Working for OSU is a fabulous backfield.

Staple calls the Wells-Pryor two-headed monster the best in the nation, not just the Big Ten.

“Pryor runs like the ‘Six Million Dollar Man,’” Staple wrote. “You can almost hear that sound effect as he churns legs past tacklers.”

With no team more formidable than “mid-major” Notre Dame left on USC’s schedule, the Trojans have an easier path to redemption — by way of South Beach — in January. The Buckeyes, on the other hand, are going to need David Blaine’s magic touch to pull off an improbable third straight trip to the title game.

Improbable but not impossible.

Figure on the Big 12 champ, either Oklahoma or Missouri, nailing down one of the berths, with Big 12 members Texas and Texas Tech being eliminated by contention. Don’t win your conference, you shouldn’t play for the title.

For the second year in a row, the SEC champ could easily be a two-loss team, which certainly would help Ohio State’s cause.

A one-loss Penn State would lose out to a one-loss OSU on the basis of their head-to-head matchup and, as bad as the Buckeyes looked the past two Januarys, it’s hard to see voters putting a non-BCS conference team (unbeaten Brigham Young?) in the title game over the Big Ten champion.

An argument for BYU would be the Mountain West’s 5-1 record this season against the Pac-10. But it’s also hard to forget how 2007 unbeaten Hawaii got a chance to crash the BCS party and bombed (41-10) against Georgia in the Sugar Bowl.

For the Buckeyes, it could come down to USC losing to Notre Dame — could you bring yourself to root for the Irish? — and Pryor, the straw that stirs the Buckeyes, siphoning the Juice out of Illinois’ Big Ten title hopes on Nov. 15.

It was Juice Williams who ruined Ohio State’s perfect season in 2007 in Columbus by throwing four touchdown passes and rushing for 70 yards in an upset of the No. 1 Buckeyes.

In four weeks, he could meet his match.

“I think he’s a superstar in the making,” Purdue coach Joe Tiller said of Pryor.

Tell fans from Altoona to Yuma something they don’t already know.

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