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Vo. 1, No. 18
This week in Ohio State football, I am thinking about themes.
Narratives.
Stories.
What will everyone be writing this time next week?
There won’t be another TWiOSUF before the Buckeyes play Miami in the Cotton Bowl, but there will be dispatches from Dallas here and at Press Pros Magazine. I’ll be posting on the BuckeyeSports.com, too, and you can go to YouTube or Facebook to find videos of interviews and anything else cool I can find while following the team.
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I’m thinking about narratives because I always think about narratives and that is sort of the point of this weekly feature existing.
I want to use This Week in Ohio State Football to piece together all the things out there floating around the Buckeyes over the course of 5-7 days and see if I can help it all make sense.
Here’s what we know so far:
Ohio State-Miami is an interesting matchup for many reasons
It should be because it’s a playoff game, right? Yeah, of course.
But then you’ve got the familiarity of some of the players.
You’ve got the unknown of just how talented either team really is since one plays in the ACC and the other lost to the best team it played in the Big Ten.
Stats give us some indication. So does the eye test, but in both cases 12 or 13 data points just aren’t that man, especially when half of them (often more) are against totally inferior competition.
The coaches actually have history as Mario Cristobal got maybe the best win of his career as a head coach when he led Oregon into Ohio Stadium and beat Ryan Day’s Buckeyes in 2021.
I’ve mentioned before that was a big signpost game for the Day era. They got out-toughed by a Ducks squad not only missing its two best defensive players but also never known for being tough.
Cristobal made it his mission to fix that, and he did a solid job from which Dan Lanning has benefited greatly. Meanwhile, Ohio State had started to trend in the wrong direction by that point, and the Ducks exposed it along with schematic deficiencies on defense.
That Oregon game sort of set Ohio State adrift. It meant the beginning of the end for defensive coordinator Kerry Coombs and an ill-fated style of individualistic defense that defined the Urban Meyer era and carried over to Day’s first three seasons.
Coombs was running a bastardized version of the single-high, four down lineman defense Day said he wanted to maintain when he became the head coach, but it was never really exactly an Xs and Os masterpiece even under Chris Ash or Jeff Hafley.
Now the Buckeyes are in the best place they’ve been schematically since Jim Heacock and Luke Fickell were figuring out ways to stop the spread offenses that dominated their days. This will be another challenge against a talented team led by a veteran quarterback.
In another interesting parallel between that Oregon game and this Miami tilt, the offense leaned too heavily on a redshirt freshman quarterback that day.
Though C.J. Stroud won some big battles, he lost the war. Day lamented a lack of balance in the postgame interview room, but the lesson still never really seemed to be learned that season ended with an embarrassing ass kicking at Michigan.
The offense seemed to wander through the wilderness for a while after that until what we saw this season was a lot different for Julian Sayin.
Whether they have really found the winning formula remains to be seen, but the charge to get tougher, to remember what it’s like to be able to run the ball because you want to not because the opponent is allowing you to, was obviously a big part of this season.
It looked like it paid off with a cathartic win at Michigan, but perhaps they flew too close to the sun against Indiana when they managed only 10 points.
(And maybe the Hoosiers are just really good, and maybe the receivers could have been healthier, too, but we’ll leave that discussion to another day, too.)
So now what?
Ohio State and Miami have more than a week to try to figure out what the other wants to do from a schematic standpoint.
Which strengths will each accentuate?
Which weaknesses will it be able to cover up?
Which weakness might one team turn into a strength with a little more time to work on it?
And most importantly, what answers will each side cook up for what their opponent does well, and what counters will there be for those?
That’s what makes football so fascinating.
For now it’s interesting to think about what a win would mean for each team
They both need validation, Miami worse than Ohio State since the Buckeyes are the defending national champions, of course, but THIS Ohio State team spent most of the regular season being talked about as if it was unbeatable. Then the Buckeyes lost, and questions about just who they have beaten arose.
Those are justified, and they don’t really matter. Ohio State has the chance to prove itself against the Hurricanes.
In an ironic twist, Miami is looking to validate its return to the role of national title contender by knocking off the defending champs and getting a little revenge for that Fiesta Bowl in January 2003.
Jeremiah Smith, who was born more than two years later, said folks down there are still mad about that game, and I suppose I would be too if I were a fan of Da U.
Ohio State shattered their air of invincibility that night in the desert, and they’ve never been the same.
Can Miami do that to Ohio State, or do the Buckeyes get a win that validates what they’ve done so far this season? Will they stay track to make program history with a second straight national title?
Well, that’s why they play the games. Then we get to decide what it meant.
OK, that’s all for today, but me your thoughts, concerns and observations about this game.
You can always reply directly to this message or find me on social media.
I love getting feedback, especially because I want to make sure I’m still dialed into the mind of the average fan. That makes serving up perspective that is helpful much easier.
Thanks as always for reading!
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