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Vo. 1, No. 16
This week in Ohio State football was not lacking for content.
The first week of “not the offseason, but also not the regular season” started with Ryan Day talking about losing the Big Ten Championship Game to Indiana and his offensive coordinator to South Florida.
It and ended with Michigan’s former head coach appearing in a courtroom in Washtenaw County.
Let’s take a closer look (after the first ad break):
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Since we don’t know who Ohio State is going to play in the Cotton Bowl yet, we might as well keep dissecting that loss to the Hoosiers, right?
Ryan Day met with reporters Sunday and talked about lack of balance on offense, lack of execution in key points and other issues that cost the Buckeyes.
“Gotta give Indiana credit, but at the same time, we know what we’re capable of, and that didn’t happen. We’ve got to get back to work and figure out why that didn’t happen. I think there’s still a bunch of guys in that room that know we can play with anybody in the country and beat anybody in the country when we’re on our game, but it’s a hard reminder that when you’re not on your game you put yourself at risk, and that’s exactly what happened.”
Is that true? Can Ohio State beat anyone when the Buckeyes are on their game?
That is something we can debate between now and the end of the month.
With the chance to go undefeated out the window, the focus returns to simply winning the day.
I wrote last week about the potential of losing their mystique as a team some were saying looked unbeatable, but Day brought up the flip side.
He said losing can be like a cleanse that brings issues to the light you might have brushed under the rug otherwise.
I don’t doubt that is true, but we’ll see if they can fix them.
If they had just blocked better, they would have won. The offensive line was on an upward trajectory until last Saturday, so can it get back on track? Indiana has a good front and deployed a good plan for messing up Ohio State’s blocking schemes.
It’s on the staff to avoid the latter next time out because they will probably keep seeing good defensive fronts.
What’s up with Brian Hartline?
That Ohio State’s no good, very bad Big Ten Championship Game plan was in part birthed by Brian Hartline’s being hired as the head coach at USF last week seems like a good bet.
Throwing in National Signing Day surely did not help.
Ohio State could and should have found a way to win anyway, and that game is over, but it’s worth revisiting to figure out what to expect next.
Day said Hartline would take care of some USF stuff this week then be back more with the Buckeyes more regularly for the playoff run. We’ll see how that works.
I never really expected Hartline to add much as an offensive coordinator because he just doesn’t seem like an Xs and Os guy. He’s a people person, which is good, but he might be cut out more to be a head coach than an offensive coordinator. Time will tell…
Before the season, the three biggest question marks for me were the new quarterback, new offensive coordinator and new defensive coordinator.
While Julian Sayin and Matt Patricia were awesome, Hartline’s performance was mixed.
They had some very high notes but also spent a lot of time spinning their wheels even before crashing Saturday night against the best defense they have seen.
Of course, how much Hartline has to do with basically anything is really only known by those in the building at the football facility.
He called the plays, but game-planning is always a team-effort. They certainly didn’t do anything without the approval of the head coach, and it’s a safe bet Day wanted a lot of the new things that have been introduced.
To be fair, most of the new things they have tried seem like great ideas. I love seeing them put big people on the field and try to play bully ball. I think it had a net positive effect on the football team because they seem more determined to play physical than they have in the past, but the execution has lacked at times.
Some of that is personnel. They have one proven blocker at tight end in Will Kacmarek, so the other guys are a work in progress individually. They have made some advances, but they had a long way to go.
Also if they want to use a fullback they should recruit some fullbacks. There’s only about 1 million guys out there in the Midwest alone who are (or could be) 230-240 pounds, have a moderate amount of athletic and running ability and could be taught to love running into people at full speed and winning championships. (Actually most of them probably already love those things now that I think about it.)
We learned halfway through the 2024 playoff Day had reinserted himself into the game planning process, and the offense improved significantly.
I would say the Buckeyes will be in good shape there no matter how much Hartline is or isn’t involved.
What happened at Michigan?
That Sherrone Moore would still be the coach of the Wolverines in a year or two seemed like an open question, but his fall this week was truly stunning.
The whole story is very sad off the field because of the damage he did to himself, his family and the person he was involved with.
His firing also leaves his assistants in limbo and has to have the players questioning their futures, and it’s a reminder of what a cesspool Jim Harbaugh apparently created in his 10 seasons at Michigan.
After breaking multiple recruiting rules and benefiting from a sophisticated advanced scouting scheme (he is said not to have known about), the 61-year-old Harbaugh is essentially banned from coaching college football until he is 74, and Moore is just one of several former assistants to have been found guilty of breaking NCAA rules at least once during Harbaugh’s watch.
If you want to know how things are going overall, The Detroit News published a story this week in which normal people at the school expressed surprise Michigan actually did anything about the Moore situation.
Yes, not only is Michigan now just generally assumed to be a dirty program, no one really expects them to try to clean it up, either.
As an assistant, Moore gets credit for fixing a Michigan offensive line that was an issue for a long time before he arrived. I’m not sure about his acumen as a head coach or leader of men, so Michigan is likely to end up with someone better than him in charge, but the timing of this hire is tricky with the coaching carousel having pretty much come to a stop. Most of the top candidates already picked their new schools or got new contracts to stay with their current employer.
The next coach will likely have a major mess to clean up, too, since at least some recruits who just signed are likely to ask out of their letters of intent, and anyone on the roster could enter the transfer portal.
Ironically, Penn State ended up getting the guy I always felt would be the most dangerous to Ohio State at Michigan. Ohio-native Matt Campbell might get the Nittany Lions over the hump instead, but the dynamics of that job are somewhat different.
I’m sure we’ll have time to pick apart those situations this offseason.
For now, I’m gonna turn my attention to the weekend.
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