Saturday was a crisp fall day in Columbus, Ohio, with temperatures recorded in the mid 60s. The Ohio State Buckeyes football team rolled past Tulane 45-6, just as expected, in front of 103,336 at Ohio Stadium.

Dwayne Haskins carved up the Green Wave to the tune of 304 passing yards, with more touchdown passes (five) than incompletions (three). Parris Campbell had eight catches for 147 yards and two scores and the second string got plenty of playing time for Ohio State.

The Best Damn Band In The Land performed a rousing multiple Script Ohio at halftime with 100-year-old Anthony Violi dotting the “I” for the alumni band in one of the coolest moments you’d ever want to see in any ceremony:

No matter how you feel about Ohio State or its football program, you have to love that moment.

Everything looked normal, with the Scarlet and Gray playing like what they are, the fourth-ranked team in the AP poll. Everything looked normal on offense, and mostly on defense, and on special teams.

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Oh yeah, and Urban Meyer returned to the Buckeyes sideline as coach.

Are things really back to normal just like that?

In the postgame press conference, the questions were partly about football and partly about Meyer’s return. Not about the reasons for the three-game suspension which Ohio State had handed down to its head coach (concurrent with a suspension of athletic director Gene Smith) to start the season. Not about Meyer’s handling of Zach Smith or the domestic abuse allegations against the former assistant.

The questions were a little bit about Tulane but quite a few looked forward to the Penn State game (as are we, there seems to be little point in dwelling on how the Buckeyes played against a vastly overmatched Green Wave team).

Meyer wanted “to thank Buckeye Nation” for supporting the team and him. He gave Ryan Day a game ball, presumably for holding the team together and, frankly, doing a really good job as interim coach during Meyer’s suspension. Day did so well that Gene Smith found it necessary to shoot down rumors that Day is the coach in waiting — rumors which would intimate that Meyer won’t be long for the job.

That’s just another layer of distraction which the Buckeyes players will have to handle.

It’s obvious that there is a lot at stake for both teams in Saturday’s game at Penn State. And because the Big Ten took such a beating in the nonconference portion of the schedule, it feels like this game has even more riding on it than usual.

If OSU loses once, even against a really good Nittany Lions bunch, how will the College Football Playoff committee evaluate the Buckeyes? Will voters factor in the Meyer controversy? They should not, but the voters are only human and the NCAA has an image — heavily flawed as it might be — to protect.

As I wrote last week, anything that happens to the Buckeyes program for the rest of the season, especially if it’s bad, will be filtered through the prism of the Meyer suspension and the events which led to it.

Are the Buckeyes mentally tough enough to deal with that?

It’s normal to ask, right?