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ESPN analyst and former Ohio State quarterback Kirk Herbstreit said it best: This season’s Buckeyes team has much bigger problems than the team which got rolled last season at Iowa.
That suspicion has been brewing for weeks and it came to full fruition in Saturday’s blowout loss at Purdue.
This Ohio State team needs to take a hard look at itself in the mirror.
Look, any team can lose from time to time. Rumor has it that even Alabama has been defeated once or twice during Nick Saban’s tenure in Tuscaloosa.
So, sure, give Purdue a ton of credit for playing with a high level of inspiration, emotion and most of all guts and execution in routing then-No. 2 Ohio State 49-20 at Ross-Ade Stadium. And if that was all there was to it — a talented Buckeyes team ran into a buzzsaw on one night — then it could be dismissed. After all, this is still a program which has just nine losses in Urban Meyer’s six-plus-year tenure.
Ohio State is usually good. But when Ohio State is bad? My goodness, is it ever bad.
The Buckeyes have lost by four or more touchdowns in each of the past three seasons. Clemson smashed OSU 31-0 in a College Football Playoff semifinal in the 2016 season. Last year came that 55-24 loss at Iowa, which surely kept the Scarlet and Gray out of another shot at the CFP.
Saturday gave Buckeyes fans perhaps the worst loss of all under Meyer. But the most troubling aspect for Buckeye Nation has to be that this team’s performance has been building for weeks toward a game where OSU would simply lay an egg. The Buckeyes fell short in every way, exemplified in a handful of plays.
Purdue freshman receiver Rondale Moore is one of the most exciting players in the Big Ten. He made the Buckeyes defenders look bad early, breaking several tackles:
Moore, on his way to 12 receptions for 170 yards and two scores, made a few more would-be tacklers miss later in the first quarter to convert on third and long:
The last highlight for Moore was this game in a nutshell: OSU’s defensive players thought they had him stopped and they were wrong, leading to a whole lot of standing around where there should have been a whole lot of hitting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66W27drxPC4
But Moore was not the only Boilermaker to make OSU’s defense look foolish. Enter running back D.J. Knox, who ran for three touchdowns including this play:
Sure, a guy can miss a tackle sometimes, but this play was an example of everything going wrong at once: Poor angles, poor pursuit, a weak attempt at a tackle.
Meyer said on Sunday that the program would fix this situation: “We have good players, good coaches. we’re gonna get back to work. We lost a game last year and came right back. We have good guys and we’re going to work our you-know-whats off and get this thing right.”
Sounds good, and Meyer has been here before. But again, if it was just a few items or a couple of big plays, OSU fans could perhaps get over even a blowout loss.
But the same problems keep cropping up:
- Penalties: How does somebody with as much experience as Isaiah Price keep committing false starts week after week? How does this team commit such an obvious roughing the kicker penalty on a punt to keep a Purdue drive alive, leading to a Boilermakers touchdown?
- Allowing big plays: Purdue punter Joe Schopper not only took that hit, he took another one on a gutsy fake field goal near the end of the first half. He took a whack right as he got the 4 yards needed for the first down, and Purdue seemed to feed off the energy not only from a punter running for a first down, but from the coaching decision to make such a call in the first place. No wonder Ohio State is 94th in the country in yards allowed per play, according to sports-reference.com. Last year, OSU’s defense was third in the country in that category.
- Line play is not progressing: Yes, losing Nick Bosa hurts. And his decision to leave the program entirely to prepare for the NFL Draft cannot have been easy for his teammates. But that defensive line and its offensive counterpart has declined as the season has gone on.
- Running game disappears: This is somewhat related to the item above, but J.K. Dobbins and Mike Weber have not produced enough in recent weeks. It once seemed a foregone conclusion that both running backs would have 1,000 rushing yards this season; now it’s not certain that either of them will hit that mark.
- Coaching: This has to be said: The stench from Meyer’s handling of the Zach Smith case might be carrying over on the field. Ask yourself: Does this team look better since Meyer’s return from a three-game suspension than it did under interim coach Ryan Day? As the level of competition has risen in recent weeks, the Buckeyes just have not looked like an inspired or inspiring bunch. One has to wonder how many veterans, especially after the Bosa situation, have one eye on the NFL already. I asked weeks ago if the College Football Playoff committee would punish Ohio State for its off-field mess. It doesn’t matter now because OSU’s resume no longer even merits CFP consideration. That’s on Meyer.
If the Buckeyes want to salvage anything — B1G title, continuing its dominance over Michigan, pleading their case to be allowed back into the CFP conversation — from 2018, they need to do some soul-searching and come up with better answers. Not just because of the Purdue debacle, but because of the existing problems which led to it.
Longtime newspaper veteran Jim Tomlin is a writer and editor for saturdaytradition.com and saturdaydownsouth.com.