Vo. 2, No. 3

This week in Ohio State football, the Buckeyes begin their second season.

Well, not quite, but Ryan Day said some things this week that sort of make it seem like that.

Let’s take a closer look at that as well as the Kent State Golden Flashes, a team that will enter Ohio Stadium on Saturday with a lot going against it but also nothing to lose.

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The Golden Flashes are 1-1 this season after getting blown out 57-0 at South Carolina then winning 36-15 at home over FCS Wofford.

They were 5-7 last season, their first under head coach Mark Carney, after going winless in 2024 and winning one game in ’23.

They were 115th in the nation in scoring and 128th in points allowed last season and finished ranked 130th in F+, an advanced metric that combines play-by-play efficiency data and drive success.

Kent State last had a winning record in 2020, when the Flashes went 3-1 in the truncated COVID season. Their last full-season winning record came in 2019 when the Golden Flashes were 7-6, and they last finished more than one game over .500 in 2012 when they went 11-3 under former Ohio State assistant coach Darrell Hazell.

In the preseason, KSU was picked to finish eighth in the MAC and is led by Dru DeShields, a 6-2, 195-pound senior QB from Beloit West Branch High School. He’s been projected to be one of the two or three best QBs in the MAC this season.

Da’Realyst Clark is also a dangerous return man who took two kickoffs back for touchdowns last season.

Kent has 58 players on its roster from Ohio, including 12 from Southwest Ohio:

The Flashes enter with a 1-24 record versus Big Ten schools, defeating Rutgers 35-23 in 2012.

In an ironic twist, Kent State is coming into Ohio Stadium 1-1 thanks to a fourth quarter comeback win last week. The Flashes trailed Wofford 15-14 entering the last stanza but scored 22 unanswered points.

For more on the history of Ohio State’s series with Kent State, the MAC and the rest of the many colleges in Ohio, check out this week’s Buckeye Historian, a free newsletter I send on Thursdays.

I guess we can’t pretend the Texas game never happened….

The Longhorns certainly came up a lot more than the Golden Flashes this week during interviews in Columbus, which is to be expected.

One of the interesting things I heard from Ryan Day on Tuesday was in regards to personnel. Essentially they tried to narrow the number of players they felt were ready to be trusted in a big game at Texas but now will open things back up to see who can earn a spot the rest of the season.

I wrote about that more for BuckeyeInsiders.com:

BuckeyeInsiders also offers a lot of film breakdown, including Ross Fulton’s take on what went wrong on each side of the ball.

The gist: Nobody on offense was too bad, but no one was really good, either. (Even Jeremiah Smith’s effectiveness tailed off in the second half.)

Schematically, the inability to run outside zone, a staple of new offensive coordinator Arthur Smith’s offense, was a big issue, and that was a result both of how they were trying to do it (blocking assignments) and who was trying to make it work (especially with the tight ends struggling to block).

This Week in Ohio State Football: Coordinators speak and gold pants awarded

Texas also turned up the pressure in the second half, and neither the OL nor Julian Sayin handled it all that well.

As for the defense, Matt Patricia came out with a conservative plan that worked…. until it didn’t.

Sitting back and forcing Steve Sarkisian to be patient as a play caller and make Arch Manning pick them apart was a good strategy. Manning struggled to do that for much of the night, but he ultimately overcame it during the comeback when the defense likely wore down and Patricia needed to mix things up.

Fulton also points out they might be asking too much of the new-look defensive front, where a step down in talent likely calls for different tactics than the ones that worked last season (this is not too surprising).

Also regarding personnel, it sounds like right tackle Phillip Daniels and defensive end Zion Grady won’t play this week after leaving the Texas game with unidentified injuries.

Buckeye Sports Bulletin notes one of those young players we might see more of is freshman running back Legend Bey: Day Hoping to Get Legend Bey on the Field More Going Forward

At Press Pros Magazine, my colleague Jeff Gilbert wrote about how Ohio State needs to get better at protecting leads after blowing too many games in similar fashion to the Texas loss.

Since I wrote in this space last week I thought the coordinators would be a (positive) difference for Ohio State in the Texas game, I figured I should address that.

Arthur Smith and Matt Patricia made me look like a genius… at least for 30 minutes or so. They seemed to run out of answers as the clock got closer to midnight, though. Sarkisian and defensive coordinator Will Muschamp made adjustments to overcome Ohio State’s initial plans, and that is a bit concerning going forward…

I also have to wonder if there is any particular reason Ohio State seems to struggle to execute in these big games.

Here’s an admittedly weird theory: Are they hurt by basically never playing close games against inferior competition?

That might seem strange, but I am sure if you are my age or older you remember close contests, great escapes and even losses against inferior teams were not unheard of in the Jim Tressel and Urban Meyer eras. I generally assume that is typical for every good team across college football even now, too.

Ohio State almost never loses to inferior teams under Ryan Day, which is a good thing of course, but it might ironically have a downstream negative effect of Day’s Buckeyes not developing the kind of a clutch gene that they need in these matchup games. I don’t know if there’s an answer to that other than maybe taking the first half against Rutgers off, but it’s an interesting thing to think about, at least to me.

What do you think?

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