Your (almost) daily dose of good-natured, Ohio State banter.
Everybody knows that one of the best parts of being a sports fan is debating and dissecting the most (and least) important questions in the sporting world with your friends. So, we’re bringing that to the pages of LGHL with our favorite head-to-head column: You’re Nuts.
In You’re Nuts, two LGHL staff members will take differing sides of one question and argue their opinions passionately. Then, in the end, it’s up to you to determine who’s right and who’s nuts.
Today’s Question: What does Ohio State have to fix in order to beat Penn State?
Jami’s Take:
I wrote a column earlier this week criticizing James Franklin’s record against ranked teams, and specifically against Ohio State. In the column, I discussed that while Franklin’s overall record with Penn State has been great, his woeful record against the Buckeyes and other ranked teams all but negates his successes.
In 10 games against the Buckeyes, Franklin has won just one game despite almost always playing the Buckeyes close. My column argued that bogged down by poor clock management and baffling play-calling, Franklin is the Buckeyes’ biggest asset heading into Happy Valley Saturday.
If Franklin and his coaching staff are the Buckeyes’ biggest asset, Ryan Day and his coaching staff are their Achilles heel.
That’s right — I’m a real equal opportunist!
Now, I like Ryan Day just fine, and I definitely want him to do well, because his success is also Ohio State’s success and I don’t like when my team loses. But when we break down the whole buffet of issues we’ve seen from the Buckeyes in their last two games—first, against Oregon and again this past week against Nebraska—the uniting thread between all of them is a problem with the coaching.
Day is, of course, not the only coach on the staff—with his title and paycheck, he ultimately bears the brunt of the blame, but we’ll touch on other coaching issues too. This is not to let the players off the hook—we saw a real breakdown in some of the fundamental execution over the last two weeks, and the players are responsible for that. But when the issues go beyond execution to strategy, at some point, we have to question the guys responsible for calling the shots.
Take quarterback Will Howard’s game-ending slide against Oregon, for example. In his attempt to put Ohio State in a better position to kick a field goal, Howard slid—just a bit too far, and while he tried to call timeout, he didn’t get it off in time. The slide wound up running the clock down instead of stopping it. Whether or not you believe one second should have remained for a final play, Howard should never have been put in the position where that slide was his only option. That boiled down to Day’s failure to call a timeout, an amateurish clock management error that potentially cost them the game (we’ll never know, because we never got to see Jayden Fielding kick what could have been a game-winning field goal because the clock ran out).
On the defensive side, the Buckeyes found themselves in a situation where the usually steady cornerback Denzel Burke got beat and missed tackles all night. Now the getting beat and the missing tackles part? That falls on Burke. The “all night” part? That’s on the coaching staff. If someone is making mistakes like that repeatedly, you don’t just leave them on the field. You find a way to get them out of their own head or you make adjustments. In fact, the lack of adjustments was a pervasive problem throughout the Oregon game, given how much Ohio State’s defense struggled. You can’t just throw your guys to the wolves out there. It’s true that there’s only so much the coaches can do from the sidelines, but if what’s happening on the field isn’t working, it does fall on the coaches to try something new. Carrying on as if everything was fine didn’t set Burke or the rest of the team up for success.
Then against Nebraska, coaching issues abounded again, this time more prominently on the offensive side of the ball.
And frankly, the problems started before the season even kicked off, with a failure to net enough depth at offensive tackle. When Josh Simmons, who really came into his own this season, got injured against Oregon, it meant Zen Michalski would start against Nebraska whether he was ready to do so or not.
As it turns out, he really wasn’t. To be clear, every guy on the roster needs to be ready to go at all times, and Michalski had two weeks to prepare to step in. Still, he struggled. Perhaps the fact that the Buckeyes were in that situation at all falls on the coaches for failing to identify left tackle as a position where they possibly needed more options. There were no moves to use the transfer portal to their advantage here.
This led us to Saturday, where Michalski struggled with both running and pass protection. In fact, the run protection was so bad that even though Ohio State has two of the best running backs in the country in TreVeyon Henderson and Quinshon Judkins, they could not get a run game going at all. It’s not Henderson’s or Judkins’ fault, but them’s the breaks.
But what I would like to know is why offensive coordinator Chip Kelly insisted on continuing the attempts to run the ball, despite the fact that they obviously weren’t getting anywhere. While Howard had some shaky moments (which I’m going to chalk up to the poor pass protection), the Buckeyes were accomplishing more through the air than on the ground. This kind of playcalling is a real head-scratcher, something I expect from Franklin and something I definitely don’t want to see against Franklin this weekend.
Are there players who need to clean it up before Saturday? Absolutely. But if we fail to beat the Nittany Lions in Happy Valley, it will mark Day’s fourth consecutive loss to a ranked opponent, and when you’re working with a team that has as much natural talent as this Ohio State team does, to me that says more about the coaches than the guys on the field.
So before we head to Happy Valley, the Ohio State coaching staff needs to regroup and figure out how it’s going to make necessary adjustments throughout the game, keep the Buckeyes in the contest, and manage the clock efficiently. If they can do that better than we’ve seen the last two weeks, they just might land on a way to course-correct many of the team’s other issues.
Matt’s Take:
I don’t want to put too fine of a point on it, but Ohio State’s offensive line is a disaster, and if any one thing costs the Buckeyes a Big Ten or national championship this season, it will absolutely be that. Now this is not really a criticism of the players — although from five-stars all the way down, no one is consistently performing at an elite level — but instead, this is a critique of how Ryan Day and Justin Frye have mangled every aspect of this line construction from recruiting to development to transfer portal to rotation.
Everyone knew going into last season that the Buckeyes’ biggest weakness would be its o-line; and lo and behold, they were right. Then, coming out of the embarrassing bowl loss to Missouri, the staff almost immediately plucked Seth McLaughlin out of the portal to replace Carson Hinzman.
That was a good move. McLaughlin has been a very solid addition to the line, arguably the best lineman aside from the now-injured Josh Simmons. However, the Buckeyes’ interest in improving their line stopped there. They did not seriously entertain any other portal line prospects including Columbus native Carter Smith who is now seemingly set to have an All-Big Ten season as an Indiana Hoosier.
Instead, they decided to sit pat with what they had, presumably banking on their ability to develop multi-year guys into competent contributors.
So, to mix my sports metaphors, their offensive line development has been a swing-and-miss, and their portal strategy was akin to taking Strike 2. So, when you combine that with below-par recruiting — over the past three seasons, OSU has signed nine offensive linemen with an average 247Sports Composite Grade of 311 and only three were in the top 200 — that is the definition of a strikeout.
Now, with their best offensive lineman out for the season, the Buckeyes have literally no one to turn to. Zen Michalski looked completely unprepared to play in a Big Ten football game last week, despite four years in the program. And to make matters worse, he is injured and there’s no guarantee he will be able to play left tackle this week against Penn State.
It is unforgivable that Day and Frye let the o-line situation devolve to this level of mediocrity. The position group is devoid of top talent, has no starter-level depth, and has the ability to completely blow up whatever offensive advantage OSU’s elite playmakers provided.
Can this staff figure out a way to remedy — or even just hide — these glaring holes in time to travel to State College this weekend? I doubt it, but we better hope so, or it is going to be a very Unhappy Valley for the Scarlet and Gray.