WOW was I wrong on that previous post. I will now embrace my inner politician and completely ignore that this ever happened, focusing instead on changing the subject and looking ahead.
I did a pretty simple statistical analysis based on the NCAA's numbers, and my conclusion is:
The offensive line is the weak link here.
This is not a completely original thought, but Ohio State falls in the middle of the road in most categories, so here are some standout numbers to back up my case (all out of 119 FBS teams from the NCAA website).
-OSU is 106th in sacks allowed, at almost 3 per game.
-OSU is 97th in tackles for loss allowed, at almost 7 per game.
-OSU is 94th in total offense, 108th in passing and 37th in rushing. This could lead people to say that the rushing is strong because of the line, but the disparity in these two aspects of the offense would leave me to believe the "Beanie Clause*" in this case.
You might say, Pryor runs around too much or doesn't make decisions fast enough. However, if you look at red zone offense, where the skill players need to come through, you see that OSU is 16th in the nation. And OSU is 19th in turnover margin, which we'd love to see better, but it could be much worse.
OSU is in the middle of the pack as far as penalties and yards lost on penalties. This is not an unskilled offensive line, which leads me to believe it's pure execution.
The defense has mostly been solid, with a few standouts positive and negative:
-OSU is tied for 8th in turnovers gained. Thank you defense.
-OSU is 12th in overall defense (23rd in rushing defense and 16th in passing defense), and 13th in scoring defense.
-OSU is 13th in pass efficiency defense.
-OSU is 2oth in first downs allowed.
-OSU is 90th in 4th down conversions for defense. This means that the team gives up 4th downs almost 63% of the time. No good.
This was fun for me. I hope it was the same for you. I know the team is working hard, and I'm extremely proud to be a Buckeye. But there's always room for improvement.
-RJ Bee
*The Beanie Clause is something I made up today that can be used to describe how Beanie Wells continues to put up great numbers despite the opportunities created for him being relatively low. This is all his size and speed.
