BUCKEYES BUZZ:@ One of the most treasured traditions at Ohio State is for each member of a Buckeyes team that defeats Michigan to receive a small charm in the shape of "gold pants."

The origin of the gold pants is coach Francis Schmidt's saying before the 1934 game against Michigan that the Wolverines "put their pants on one leg at a time, the same as everyone else." After the victory, a tradition began — and the Buckeyes hope to continue it in the wake of Saturday's noon start at The Big House.

S Kurt Coleman says not everyone understands the importance of the trinket.

"Someone asked me if we really wear gold pants," he said. "So some people don't even know what's going on with the whole gold pants tradition. It's funny to hear people's reaction when I tell them, 'No, it's just a little necklace thing,' and how it came about. There's a lot of tradition that goes into it. My mom cherishes those gold pants. She won't take them off her neck."

Coach Jim Tressel was asked what he did with his gold pants.

"I just take mine home and give them to (wife) Ellen, never to be seen again," he said.

Since Ohio State has won the last five meetings and has already clinched a Rose Bowl berth and at least a share of the Big Ten title, some think the Buckeyes have less to play for against Michigan.

"You know, this year you could think there's not going to be an edge because we've already clinched the Rose Bowl and they're losing, but it's still 'The Game.' It's still about getting gold pants for us, it's still about a bowl game for them. It's still about pride," OL Jim Cordle said.

The gold pants only add to the magnitude of The Game.

"Yeah, that's very special. It sets Ohio State apart," he said. "You see some of the players that have been here that have parents, their dads played here, so someone like Ryan Lukens, his dad gave his mom the gold pants and then Ryan gave his mom the gold pants. She was just littered with gold pants.

"It's just something special. It's very cool, and I want five of them."

ANN ARBOR BOUND:@ The Buckeyes left campus around 1:15 p.m. Friday headed north.

PROGRAMMING NOTE:@ At 10:30 a.m. Saturday, the Big Ten Network profiles legendary Ohio State RB Chic Harley.

In 1919, Harley led Ohio State to its first victory over Michigan in what some consider the official beginning of the rivalry. After a stellar career at Ohio State, Harley suffered from mental illness and spent most of his adult life in mental hospitals except for a brief period during which he was honored with a huge parade in Columbus.

OH CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN:@ The fourth, or offensive-team captain, for the Michigan game is WR/KR Ray Small.

The honorary captain is none other than two-time Heisman Trophy winner, Archie Griffin.

COOOOOP:@ Former Ohio State coach John Cooper's take on Saturday's showdown in Ann Arbor, Mich.:

"I don't think there's any question that (Michigan's) Rich Rodriguez is a great coach, and the offense he is running is a step ahead of the time, but you've got to have some horses to run it. Combine that with the fact they don't have the stellar defense they normally have, and it looks like a mismatch," he said. "There is one great defensive team in the Big Ten and that's here at Ohio State. Michigan is not going to score much on Ohio State. They will play hard and play their guts out, but I don't know if they have anything left."

LACHEY'S VIEW:@ Ex-Ohio State All-American OL Jim Lachey is a Buckeyes football radio analyst.

He thinks Ohio State will win, but adds a caveat:

"I think Rich Rodriguez is a good football coach, No. 1. These last two years people have told me that I am crazy for saying that, but I think he understands what he needs to do and he might not have the right personnel and maybe the right situation like he had in other places to get it done as fast as he needs to get it done," Lachey said. "He has a good system and a good scheme, and I think we have seen them make some good strides this year with (QB) Tate Forcier who can make some plays back there. It is about building that whole thing. It is not about that one unit (offense), but all three units and they are struggling a little bit on special teams and giving up some big plays on defense. All it takes though for it to turn around is one game and I have played enough football to know that."

PRYOR CONVICTION:@ Former Ohio State coach Earle Bruce believes Saturday's game will tell a lot about Buckeyes QB Terrelle Pryor.

"He's made headway. We'll see how much up there (in Ann Arbor)," Bruce said. "You can't make mistakes on the road, and that's where he had his biggest problems, at Purdue. Then he made headway a couple of weeks ago at Penn State. This game will be a real test of our quarterback. How do you play against Michigan?"

FOUR-LETTER WORD:@ One word that is bandied about this week, particularly by Ohio State fans toward their nemesis to the north, is hardly the sentiment displayed by Tressel. He said he does not HATE Michigan.

"That's probably a little bit strong of a word to use, most especially in athletics, and maybe anytime," Tressel said. "But what do I think (when Ohio State fans say they hate Michigan)? I guess I think that's their opinion. It's not necessarily mine."

TURKEY, THEN FOOTBALL:@ This is the last year in the foreseeable future that the Ohio State-Michigan game will be the week before Thanksgiving.

Big Ten coaches voted to push the season back a week in order to have a bye week.

So, starting in 2010, The Game will be two days after Thanksgiving.

INDOCTRINATION TO FOOTBALL:@ The Toledo Blade reports that a Glass City attorney told 47 men and women about to be sworn in as U.S. citizens on Thursday that they should embrace the Ohio State-Michigan game.

"Americans are crazy about college football and now that you are new Americans, you should be crazy about college football too," Timothy Nackowicz told the new citizens in a ceremony at Owens Community College. "You're in Ohio so you should be an Ohio State Buckeyes fan."

Nackowicz also advised the newest Americans that they should wear scarlet and gray instead of anything maize and blue.

He also led the group in the O-H, I-O chant.

Discovering that there was a Wolverines fan in the group, Nackowicz added, "It's unfortunate, but in America all views are welcome."

©2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Summit County Common Pleas Judge Thomas Teodosio sentenced 40-year-old Michael Knudson on Friday. He had pleaded guilty to two counts of murder, aggravated arson and evidence tampering.

His 64-year-old mother, Patricia Knudson, and 42-year-old brother, John Knudson, had been beaten, apparently with a hatchet-like weapon. Their bodies were found six days after fire destroyed their foreclosed Hudson home in April.

Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh says Knudson snapped over the family's financial pressures.

©2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Michael Barrett, of Westmont, Ill., was due in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Friday to face one count of interstate stalking. He is free on $4,500 bond.

Court documents filed Wednesday say the 48-year-old Barrett made a video of Andrews after altering the peephole in her Columbus hotel room door in February 2008. He's accused of making several videos in Nashville in September 2008. The documents say he also altered a peephole at a hotel where Andrews was staying in Milwaukee.

Federal prosecutors say he uploaded the videos to the Internet and tried to sell them to celebrity gossip site TMZ.

©2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

That's customarily a positive a sign. Employers usually hire temporary workers before they add full-time jobs. But in this case, the temporary hiring may be inflated by the auto sector, which has boosted production to replace depleted inventories. As a result, the increase might not be sustainable.

Some of last month's job gains also were in sectors such as education, health care and government, which have fared relatively well during the recession. By contrast, there's little evidence that companies in hard-hit industries are hiring full-time staff.

Overall, 28 states added jobs in October. That's up from only seven in September and eight in August. It's also the largest number to record increases since 33 states did so in February 2008, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank.

"It's a positive signal ... that states are mixed rather than uniformly bad," said Jim Diffley, a regional economist at IHS Global Insight. Previous reports have all been "doom and gloom," he said.

The unemployment rates rose in 29 states in October from the previous month, the Labor Department said Friday. Thirteen states saw their jobless rates drop.

Michigan still had the nation's highest unemployment rate in October: 15.1 percent. It was followed by Nevada at 13 percent, Rhode Island at 12.9 percent, California at 12.5 percent and South Carolina's 12.1 percent.

California, Florida, Delaware and Washington, D.C., posted their highest unemployment rates on records dating to 1976.

Still, Michigan's jobless rate fell from 15.3 in September, as the state gained 38,600 jobs, mostly in professional and business services sector. That category includes temporary workers.

Other states with heavy auto manufacturing activity also saw jumps in the professional and business category. They included Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.

Sophia Koropeckyj, managing director at Moody's Economy.com, said the gains could reflect greater use of temp workers by auto makers. The government's Cash for Clunkers auto rebate program led to big sales gains in August, forcing auto makers to increase production to replace inventories.

But sales dropped after the clunkers program ended. And demand for new cars is likely to remain weak, Koropeckyj said.

"We won't necessarily see a sustained increase" in auto employment, she added.

Koropeckyj said her firm hopes to see higher manufacturing and construction employment. That would reflect increasing business investment, a key ingredient for a healthy recovery. But it wasn't apparent in Friday's report, she said.

Still, there were other positive signs. Texas added 41,700 jobs, increasing its total payrolls for only the second time in the past year. Its unemployment rate edged up to 8.3 percent from 8.2 percent.

Most of Texas' gains were in education, health care and government. California, which added over 25,000 jobs, saw a similar mix.

Oklahoma added 8,800 jobs, the fourth-highest in the country, mostly in professional and business services, education and health care.

Nevada, meanwhile, saw its unemployment rate drop to 13 percent, from 13.3 percent. That's the first decline in its rate since November 2005.

The national unemployment rate jumped to 10.2 percent in October, the highest in 26 years, from 9.8 percent in September.

©2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Federal prosecutors say John Valentin provided the Cuyahoga (ky-uh-HOH'-guh) County official with $3,250 worth of free specialty granite work at his home. In return, Valentin's friend got help obtaining a visa.

The elected official wasn't identified in Friday's court filing.

The charge against Valentin was contained in a criminal information, which often is used instead of an indictment when a plea deal has been arranged. Neither Valentin nor his attorney immediately returned calls seeking comment.

More than one dozen people, including county government employees and contractors, have been charged in the wide-ranging FBI investigation.

©2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Suspended Martins Ferry Police Chief Barry Carpenter testified Friday at his trial on burglary and other charges. He says he went into the woman's home after he saw a basement door open while on routine patrol.

He says he took a photo of a surrogacy file that contained two ultrasound pictures and of a plaster cast of a pregnant stomach. He says he showed the photo of the cast to paparazzi and to several other people.

Carpenter says he met with the photographers after being called by the police chief of a neighboring town.

___

Information from: WTOV-TV, http://www.wtov9.com

©2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Dealerships clustered in Bedford that have called their location the "Automile" for about 50 years are suing car sellers in North Olmsted who recently began using the same term.

The Bedford Automobile Dealers Association says the North Olmsted Auto Collection is causing confusion and needs to stop saying Automile.

North Olmsted dealer Bernie Moreno says his group would rather spend money on advertising than attorney fees. He says they offered to use "Motor Mile" instead but the two sides couldn't come to terms on that.

©2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Travis Fischer will be eligible for parole after 30 years under Thursday's sentence from a judge in southeast Ohio's Morgan County.

Fischer had pleaded guilty earlier this month to charges including aggravated murder, rape and arson. Prosecutors said he attacked 35-year-old Abi (A'-bee) Matthews with the bat and raped her at her home in the community of Malta, then stole her car and burned it.

In court, Matthews' family members shared their grief and bewilderment over her death in June. The defendant didn't speak, though his attorney told the judge Fischer feels remorse and wants to atone.

©2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services said Friday that joblessness increased despite slightly more hiring by both services and goods-producing businesses.

Department director Douglas Lumpkin says more workers found themselves unemployed and looking for work, keeping the state's labor market weak.

The number of workers unemployed in Ohio last month was 618,000, up from 594,000 in September.

But nonfarm payroll employment rose by 1,400.

Ohio joblessness had fallen in both August and September. Officials said the reason was that job seekers were getting discouraged and dropping out of the labor force.

©2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A federal appeals court is pushing a condemned killer to say why his lawsuit opposing lethal injection in Ohio shouldn't be dismissed.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati has given attorneys for Kenneth Biros until Friday afternoon to present arguments.

A federal judge has temporarily delayed Biros' Dec. 8 execution but left open the possibility the execution could still happen if the state revised its injection rules.

Biros has argued that Ohio's three-drug injection process could cause severe pain in violation of the Constitution.

The state last week replaced that system with a single dose of anesthetic, and says the new approach renders Biros' lawsuit moot.

Biros killed 22-year-old Tami Engstrom near Warren in 1991 after he offered to drive her home from a bar.

©2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.