Danny ChaiBoring football discussion. Almost certain no one will read this all the way through.
I’m still thinking about the OSU-Florida game. A terrible game that left a terrible feeling. Not as bad as the Stanford loss to Alabama when Stanford was a 1 seed and Alabama an 8, but it’s up there.
I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit, and in the end, I hate to say it, but the Buckeyes just got outcoached. Apparently they were scared of Florida’s speed, so on defense, they played the entire game in a deep zone, determined to prevent the big play. And they succeeded at that. Florida didn’t have a single play that went for more than 20 yards. But that strategy ended up playing exactly into Florida’s hands. Chris Leak’s problem all year was that he made critical mistakes. Because OSU stubbornly stayed in their deep zone, all he had to do was make easy short passes to the open receivers flooding the zone or throw it away. And that’s exactly what he did – if the open receiver wasn’t there, he literally threw the ball out of bounds, 5 feet above anyone’s head. The coaches clearly told him, if the receiver isn’t wide open, just throw it away. Minimize mistakes. And since OSU stayed in that deep zone, there were open receivers underneath more often than not.
In retrospect, what they should have done is applied more pressure, maybe leave Florida’s receivers covered 1 on 1. Leaves open the possibility of the big play, but it challenges Leak, with pressure and testing his arm. Since he’s so mistake prone, they needed to challenge him. That stupid deep zone took away Florida’s biggest Achilles heel. Especially after they dinked and dunked 7 yards a play on their nth touchdown drive, they should have switched the defense up.
On offense, the battle was clearly won on the line. OSU’s linemen couldn’t block Florida’s for spit. And even still, they didn’t vary up the play-calling with some misdirection to slow them down. No draws (hardly any run plays at all. That’s another thing that angered me. They’d get decent yardage on their runs, and nothing on their passing game, and they still kept going to the pass. If you browse the play by play or the box score it’s ridiculous – generally decent runs, followed by incomplete passes or T.Smith runs for 0 yards, which really means a sack. And still they didn’t vary it up), no screens, no roll-outs, nothing. I don’t think having Ginn in there would have made any difference. Smith was getting no time to throw and they did nothing to mitigate that.
In short, OSU went in with a faulty game plan that minimized Florida’s weaknesses and played to their strengths, then failed to make any meaningful adjustments to that. They got outcoached. And now everyone from OSU is leaving to enter the draft. Sad.
On the bright side, go Cardinal basketball!