Ryan Day details format of Ohio State's spring game Saturday
Ryan Day shared that Saturday’s Ohio State spring game won’t be a traditional Scarlet vs. Gray scrimmage, but instead an offense vs. defense scoring format.
Depth issues were one reason for the choice of format.
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“I think that we are a little light on the O-line. And so I think in order to keep it where we can roll guys in the depth and not running guys across the field and being more organized, I think this is a better way to control who’s in the game,” Day told reporters in his Thursday press conference. “Also, it allows us to have a couple where we’re going to do some thud and not tackle early in the game. And although it’s not going to be Scarlet and Gray, we’re still going to get to just as many reps. But it allows us to mix and match guys and have guys play for the offense and defense where if it was Scarlet and Gray, we would need them to play on both sides of the ball. It just becomes logistically a little harder to manage.”
Day also said that the spring showcase will open with “thud” levels of contact before moving to full-on tackling for the rest of the game. One reason to have tackling in the spring game is to get ready for Week 1 against Notre Dame.
“I just think we need to play the game this year and we’ve got to go out there and tackle and play,” Day said. “And I think it’d be good for a lot of our guys to do that, get out there. The first game of the year, we played Notre Dame at home and we’ve got to be ready to roll. So once you get into the preseason, you start getting closer and closer to that first game, you start to really hold your breath because you don’t want to lose guys. But also we’ve got to tackle, we’ve got to play physical, we’ve got to be tough. I mean, if we want to reach our goals this year, we’re going to have to be that way. We’re gonna have to play that way. So we’ll do that on Saturday.”
OSU is kicking off its spring game at noon ET. It will air on the Big Ten Network.