Our Honor Defend

While the Buckeyes are in a position where it is necessary to move forward and deal with Minnesota this week, the ugly loss to Purdue still lingers.  It may not be hard to shake that loss in the bigger picture.  Losses happen.  We move forward.  Accordingly, no one is discussing the 2004 losses to Northwestern and us almost getting blanked against Iowa that same year.  This loss, if not devastating, is one that’s almost impossible to satisfactorily explain.  Tressel tried.  It came up during his weekly press conference.

The implication was I didn’t think I did a very good job of getting them to really understand the challenge we had, it’s hard for people to understand the depth of a challenge, but I didn’t think I did a very good job as I looked out, I didn’t see — there’s nothing you can put — I can’t give it an exact, well, this person did that, I didn’t have a good feel, maybe I just didn’t have a good feel that I was doing a good job, you know how that goes, but I didn’t sense that from anyone that, man, these guys are good or these guys, man, I can’t believe they’re not 5-1.

There were really three groups that I felt a little bit concerned last week when I stood in front of, there’s the quarterback club over there that meets every Tuesday and I was talking to them about Purdue and, yeah, right, uh-huh. And then there’s this group that was not all that interested with our upcoming opponent and then there was — those two groups really have nothing to do with what we can do, but then there’s the third group I wasn’t totally convinced that I was getting across to the group that we’re going to line up on the field the extent of the challenge and that’s our job.

It’s been a long day for me, so I’m not able to thoroughly dissect Tresselese.  Well… moving on…

Larimore Out Again; Herron Maybe Out As Well

Larimore is out again out for this week’s matchup with the Gophers.  Herron was listed as questionable.  There will be no changes in the depth chart at their respective positions.  Denlinger is still in for Larimore and Saine is starting at tailback.

Offensive Line Problems

I don’t think there’s any way I can dress up the offensive line.  At their top form this season, they were a decent unit that looked like they could improve through the course of the season and become an above average unit.  They’re not USC, Alabama or Florida¹, and they weren’t going to be by season’s end.  At least I thought they would get better.  Now, I can’t think of any other way to characterize them as weak.  Things look as grim as their 2008 counterparts.  Yes, Bryant Browning’s holding penalty was humorous if you’re into that kind of thing, but the unit hurt more than they help.  They hurt a lot more than they help.  The problems in the interior, where Brewster and Boren play, are not as pronounced.  I’d like to see more in the run blocking department from them.  The tackles scare me.  That Kerrigan kid from Purdue is good and he may be an all-conference performer of some type at season’s end.  However, he is not Jared Allen.  We made him into Jared Allen last week.  There wasn’t a tackle or tight end he didn’t abuse on Saturday.  When Tressel was asked about that, and the line problems in general, he responded:

So what can you do? You can go to work. You can start working to become better. You start with what are you going to ask them to do? To me that’s critical. I’ve also believed that as much of a success of any unit is making sure they’re capable of doing the things you’re asking them to do against the people you’re playing against and hope that you learn lessons along the way. I have a lot of confidence that our young people will improve. I’m not worried about that much we just need to get better.

Well, he may.  I don’t.  It bothers me to think Mike Adams and JB Shugarts may actually be worse now than they were when they entered the program.  JB Cordle at second string left tackle worries me too.  Did he not almost single-handedly derail an offensive drive against Purdue?  It’s getting to the point where I can no longer say “yeah, but” regarding Jim Bollman as an offensive line coach as I did for the Buckeye Battle Cry 2009.

Players and Coaches Stand behind Pryor

From the “well, there’s a shocker” department, the coaches and players are publicly stating their support for Pryor as QB.  The problems on the offense are bigger than Pryor (offensive line, slow-developing routes, reliance on a zone read running play with 9 defenders in the box and no middle option, et cetera).  Pryor’s problems are just getting magnified (and getting worse).  Further, I actually support keeping Pryor in the game from beginning to end.  If Pryor was responsible for slamming his foot on the accelerator of the 1977 Chevette we call an offense into a brick wall, then it’s a good learning experience for him to crash with it (as opposed to tucking and rolling out after the third quarter).

Who Let Bad Jim Heacock Out of His Cage?

The bigger story of the Purdue game was the offense.  It was awful and a sad continuation of the underwhelming effort against the Badgers the week earlier.  The defense was outright baffling.  It made no adjustments to Purdue’s game plan, which was to neutralize the fierce pass rush of the defensive line with quick throws.  Ohio State refused to made adjustments.  The defensive staff refused to suffocate the Purdue wideouts with man coverage as they did in last year’s matchup.  If Ohio State mans up, I think we force Joey Elliott and the Purdue offense into more 3 and outs.  Again, it’s baffling: we’d play tight against the Trojan receiver corp of Damian Williams and David Ausberry, but allow Valentin, Carlos and Smith to nickel and dime us to submission?  This is Bad Jim Heacock — the coach that plays soft and forces teams to repeatedly execute in order to beat us.  Good Jim Heacock listens to the more aggressive tendencies of co-coordinator Luke Fickell, allowing our defense to play with a swagger while not leaving themselves exposed.  Bad Jim Heacock² is like that one family member we don’t like and don’t like talking about.  Yeah, he’s family and all, and yeah he’s a human being with constitutionally mandated rights, but you don’t have to like him and trust him around company and he has a proclivity to break the fine china.  Therefore, we keep him locked in a cage in the garage.  With Minnesota — a team that beat Purdue 35-20 — coming into town, it’s important that Bad Jim Heacock gets back in the garage and back in his cage.  Who’s responsible for that anyways?

Tressel’s Play Calling Card Is Making the Rounds

2nd and short not applicable

Cincinnati is Getting Mileage Out of This

I don’t know how well I can conceal my contempt for Cincinnati — not the program, since I nothing them, but the city in general.  WLW has been getting some mileage out of the two quality years the Bearcats have had and how Ohio State has fallen on hard times.

For example:

120 years of no one knowing they had a football team, and now they’re the cocks of the walk in the state. Well, they are. I can’t spin this predicament any other way.  We have an offense that, under normal conditions, may actually result in more turnovers in a game than first downs.  There’s nary a defensive end out there that we can block and we have a quarterback that seems to be getting worse and, oddly, is the outlier in the freshman-to-sophomore progression that every quarterback has.  Meanwhile, they have a sophisticated passing attack, a Heisman candidate QB, and have beaten everyone on their schedule so far.  Let’s be honest, people.  With our offense and our odd showing on defense this past week, there’s not a game we can’t lose and a team we can’t lose to if we keep that up.

I think what drives me more off the wall about this is that it’s just the latest in a series of incredibly dumb memes that Ohio State football has to endure.  First we don’t have the speed that the Southerners have because we operate in Ohio.  Now, we’re not the best program in our state.  Let’s be real: None of these ridiculous memes have any logical grounding for them.  They’re not artifacts of observation.  They are prior to observation and disregard information discordant with the viewpoints.  What drives me off the wall about this is that these statements are, in and of themselves, not true.  Our coaching staff has made them true.  When these dumb memes first came forward after the Florida debacle, the coaching staff tried to compile them into a take home DVD to brace for LSU.  The end result was an effort that resulted in LSU’s backup safety saying:

“We played a lot tougher teams, mentally tougher.  When they got down, they shut it down.”

Mission accomplished.  With the Big Ten-SEC bowl game war mostly even since the formation of the BCS (and actually more lopsided in favor of the SEC in the 6 years from when the SEC expanded until the BCS) and with Wisconsin and Penn State handling Arkansas and Tennessee respectively that same year, there’d be no reason to assume that Ohio State football — the essence of Ohio State football — was too slow.   Ohio State went out and made it true.

Now, with Ohio State falling flat against USC and Cincinnati putting up points against their competition, it became vogue to proclaim Ohio State was not even the best football team in the state.  Before this weekend, saying Cincinnati was a better team than Ohio State would be an invalid inference based off wins against the likes of Rutgers and SE Missouri State.  This, like the being too slow thing, is not an enlightened viewpoint.  It did not originate in an informed analysis of football around the state of Ohio to see who was tops.  It came because it was the latest in a string of hilarious things to say about Ohio State football.  It came because people enjoy scoffing at us, regionally because we’re a bit of a bully and nationally because we’ve come off as a patsy after the Florida game.  It does not come from the most informed thinkers.  It comes from people who are products of a failed system of this education, people who struggle to comprehend that you don’t have to breathe out your mouth and, likely, came from the same people who buy truck nuts for the F-250s.  It was not true when we first started to hear it.  It was made true.

It’s frustrating because nothing is being done about it.  And I can’t do anything about it.

1. At least in run blocking.  Florida pass pro is hilarious. [↩]
2. If forced to depict what Bad Jim Heacock would look like, I’d imagine he’d resemble ordinary Jim Heacock, but have a soul patch and probably wear a denim vest. [↩]