Buckeye Defense

Howard came up big

Where to start? The Buckeyes defense is an enigma wrapped in a puzzle, within a Rubik’s Cube. I just don’t know what to say. We are young, we have athletes, we are young, we are fast, oh yeah by the way we are young. Obviously, I see being young as a major problem for our defense. We replaced at least 8 starters or contributors from last season’s dominating D. It is not like we replaced scrubs, we lost the likes of Cam Heyward, Brian Rolle, and Chimdi Chekwa to name three. These three players are not easily replaceable, but this is OSU and we don’t rebuild we reload. Now we have reloaded, but not with experience, and this is showing.

In almost every game our D has come out ready to play and they have hit and hit hard, but as games have progressed, the have also hit the wall. I have witnessed our defense miss tackles, get beat, and obviously look tired. This was painfully obvious in our loss at Nebraska. For over three quarters we dominated, Nebraska could not run, they could not throw, they couldn't do anything. Then all of a sudden Braxton Miller gets hurt and our defense stops playing and Nebraska scores 21 unanswered, and boom we lose. However, then comes Illinois and our D plays a great game and shuts down the Illini. Wisconsin comes next, and look at our D again. For 3 plus quarters we shut down the Badgers (for all intense purposes we shut down the powerful Badger run for the entire game, holding them to under 100 yards rushing), but late in the 4^th quarter Wisconsin began to move the ball through the air and boom, we were losing again, but this time Braxton Miller and Devin Smith’s heroics saved us. Now we have the Indiana game.


Indiana is not a world beater, however, they are an improving team with a very good young QB and an exciting offense and they kept our defense off balance the entire game. I believe I have found reasons for each of these “collapses.” First let’s look at the Nebraska game. When Miller was in the game, he was moving the offense, and giving the D time to rest between series. Then he gets hurt, in comes Bauserman and the three and outs. Our D became tired and Nebraska took advantage of our warn out players and moved the ball and beat us, I also believe this was the case at the Miami game. The Buckeye offense could do absolutely nothing all game, and the defense spent most of the night on the field and Miami just put us away. Let’s look at Wisconsin. The Badgers are a damn good team, and our D shut them down until the end. I do not fault the D at all. Russell Wilson and the Badgers are a veteran team, and they were not going down without a fight. It is hard to keep an offense like them down all game. I expected them to hit some big plays against us, but I thought they would be spread out throughout the game, not all in the last 4 minutes.

Most people will always pick great veterans (upper classman) over green rookies (freshman and sophomores) every time, and they Badgers showed why (again thank God for our super freshman QB on offense). Now comes Indiana. In my opinion OSU has often had trouble with a spread offense, and a very mobile QB. This dates back to at least Tim Tebow and Florida. It was again evident against Indiana. Tre Roberson kept our defense off balance and confused. They did not seem to know if he would run, pass, hand it off our anything. Our defense got beat, but not enough to lose. This game was also a typical hang over game. Just one week earlier, the Buckeyes, beat/upset mighty Wisconsin, at night in the ‘Shoe. It was a great game, with a great atmosphere.

Defense has to continue to rule

There is no way they could get as up for Indiana as they were for the Badgers and boy was that apparent, when the score was quickly 10-0. The entire team (except for 3 terrific runners) was asleep at the wheel, and this included the Silver Bullets. I don’t expect what happened against Indiana to be a trend. I expect a better game against Purdue. However, we shouldn’t be fooled by Purdue’s butt kicking at the hands of Wisconsin. They are dangerous team at home, in fact they only have one loss at home and they will be primed like everyone is to take on a young Buckeyes.