Ohio State ran twice as much as they threw against Nebraska. Chip, what are we doing?

Will Howard was as close to perfect as you could expect him to be, and yet the coaches actively took the ball out of his hand in the second half.

There was a lot to be concerned and disappointed about in No. 4 Ohio State’s (6-1) 21-17 win over the Nebraska Cornhuskers (5-3), and I am sure that we will dive into all of them over the next six days leading up to next Saturday’s game against the No. 3 Penn State Nittany Lions. However, I want to focus on just one of my major complaints coming out of that thoroughly disjointed and uninspiring game.

To do so, let’s look at some stats:

Ohio State quarterback Will Howard completed 81% of his passes, averaged 17.0 yards per completion (13.8 per attempt), and finished the game with a QB rating of 246.7.

The Ohio State rushing game averaged 2.1 yards per carry (2.6 sack adjusted) and didn’t have a single run over 15 yards.

And yet, offensive coordinator Chip Kelly decided that the best course of action in a game where the Buckeyes were breaking in a new left tackle (emphasis on the word “breaking”) would be to lean on an ineffective rushing attack when the game hung in the balance.

At halftime, Howard was 9-for-9 for 167 yards, and yet, as the Buckeyes were unable to pull away from Big Red in the second half, the QB only attempted seven passes, completing four for 88 yards. Instead, OSU rushed the ball 17 times for 24 yards after intermission.

To emphasize the point, let’s look at one offensive series. While this is not a wholly offensive set of play calls, it is emblematic of the larger problem.

With the score 21-17 in favor of OSU with just 4:35 left in regulation, the Buckeyes had the ball at their own 37. Kelly called three straight runs; a one-yard gain and a no-gain by Quinshon Judkins, then a seven-yard gain by TreVeyon Henderson. That series resulted in a punt that gave Nebraska the ball back with 3:36, just 74 yards away from a go-ahead score.

The one positive on the drive was that it did force Husker’s coach Matt Rhule to spend two of his three second-half timeouts, but with his one remaining TO and the two-minute non-warning, there was plenty of time for Dylan Raiola and company to put together a game-winning drive; it also got me to drop an F-bomb on Elon Musk’s Twitter.com.

It seemed very clear from this set of calls — as well as the vast majority of the second half — that Ohio State’s staff was coaching scared. I understand the strategic rationale to run the ball in order to force Nebraska to use their timeouts, but Will Howard literally did not throw an incompletion in the first half, and yet, Kelly decided not to put the game in his hands, but rather to let it rest with a nearly completely ineffectual running attack.

This quickly after the game, I haven’t had a chance to rewatch and see how many of the second-half runs were RPOs, scrambles, or sacks — which would all change the play-calling stats to certain degrees — but with Zen Michalski obviously struggling in his first career start in place of Isaiah Simmons (before he himself was injured resulting in additional o-line tumult), there is no excuse to have 17 rushes to seven passes in a back-and-forth second half, especially when Howard was about as close to perfect as you could reasonably expect him to be.

Early in the fall, we saw an exciting level of creativity from Kelly’s play calling, with different motions, sets, and misdirections, but in only half a season, it seems like his better angels have been polluted by the overly cautious, predictable demons that we witnessed during the latter years of Ryan Day’s play-calling era. We saw nearly no surprising calls and nary a trick play against Nebraska, despite coming out of an off week following a heartbreaking loss. Thus is when Ohio State should have been establishing its identity as a national title contender as they opened up the second half of the season; instead, they raised even more questions about their ability to compete at the highest levels.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I expected more from this coaching staff. However, time and time again, regardless of the specific personnel configuration, coming off of a bye and in the biggest games, OSU’s coaches come up short. Certainly, there is an element of this that is tied to player execution, but I think an objective evaluation would show that the coaches continually fail to put the players in the best positions to succeed when being more talented won’t win games om its own.

There is no doubt that Ohio State had the far more talented roster on the field today, but Nebraska had the superior coaches and might have even had the better complete team. However, OSU’s talent won the day, despite the coaches actively steering away from the things that had been proven successful all afternoon.

My confidence in this team’s potential to win the College Football Playoff, the Big Ten, or even against Penn State next week has precipitously declined over the last two games and the players’ performances represent only a small percentage of that sea change.

I was exceedingly optimistic at the beginning of this season that Ryan Day giving up play-calling duties, rebuilding his coaching staff, and being more aggressive in the transfer portal would represent a seismic change in the intensity and intentionality of this team. However, that does not seem to have happened. Instead, we are stuck watching an immensely talented fall victim to the exact same issues that have plagued it for the totality of Day’s tenure in Columbus.