Wednesday Skull Session

By Chad Peltier on October 10, 2012 at 6:00 am
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Good morning Buckeye readers and welcome to your Wednesday Skull Session. 

I'd like to start off your morning right with a reminder (if you needed it) that The Great State of Ohio is awesome:

Deadspin's Timothy Burke reminded the world that Ohio, Ohio State, and Cincinnati were not only all Sweet 16 teams last season in college basketball, but are also now 16-0 in football. So yeah, Ohio is awesome at sports. 

 QUICK: STRIKE, SAND, AND JAMES. Ok, I actually don't have anything to say about James Quick (unless you want to read about a football fan telling him where he should go to college), but I do have some tables that I didn't have time to fit into my last Beyond the Hashes: 

In case you've forgotten, both the "quickstrike" and "quicksand" are measures of offensive and defensive points per play, respectively - so a high quickstrike is good while a high quicksand is bad. Get it? 

Now that we've played through half of the season, I thought it might be interesting to compare these numbers with the corresponding ranks for scoring offense and defense against FBS winning teams. I chose FBS winning teams because I thought it might give a more accurate view of performance than beating up/shutting out multiple Little Sisters of the Poor.

One thing to remember is that 1/6 of these teams' ranking is determined by their game vs. Ohio State - i.e. Nebraska's poor scoring defense is due in part to their performance against the Buckeyes. Quickstrike: 

  Miami UCF Cal UAB MSU Neb
Quickstrike .659 .413 .555 .509 .313 .79
Defensive rank 107 43 34 87 14 89

And Quicksand:

  miami UCF Cal UAB MSU Neb
Quicksand .133 .25 .354 .188 .266 .535
offensive rank 103 84 44 53 103 18

Though there's a small sample size (obviously) and there's some endogeneity, we can see that the offense and the defense have done about like you'd expect: really good against poorly ranked defenses and offenses, and not as good against good ones.

Interestingly, while the Miami defense was the worst the Buckeyes have faced, the Buckeye offense's best performance was against Nebraska (I have a hard time imagining Nebraska's defense is really worse than that of UAB, Cal and UCF...but maybe). Also interesting is that while Michigan State and Miami are actually tied for 103rd in the country for scoring offense, the defense held Miami to a lower points per play than Michigan State. This is particularly odd that the defense played their best game against MSU - clearly stats aren't everything. 

YARRRGH IT'S A TRAP. Meyer spoke briefly about his concerns for Indiana this week during the B1G teleconference: 

While some have joked about Ohio State running up the score on Indiana, I don't think scoring will be the issue in this game - it'll be the Indiana offense. 

It's tempting to overplay the "trap game" storyline here, but I completely agree that this defense has struggled to defend the quick passing game that Indiana runs with (somewhat) proficiency.

Indiana is actually ranked 18th in the country in passing per game (right in front of UAB and a bit ahead of Miami of Ohio, actually), so this is definitely something for the Buckeyes to work on in practice this week. Not to mention the fact that the linebacking corps will be breaking in a new starter at SAM linebacker in Josh Perry. 

WHAT IS KIRK THINKING?? Pensive Kirk and "Holy Buckeye" Musburger

 MAY THE BEST ANNOUNCER WIN. Lost Lettermen attempts to rate the best broadcasting duo, and in somewhat of an upset, the southern duo of Verne Lundquist and Gary Danielson take the top slot, while the GameDay crew of Kirk Herbstreit and Brent Musburger come in second. 

They had this to say of former OSU quarterback Kirk Herbstreit: 

Herbstreit started out his broadcasting career with ESPN “College GameDay” as the crew's "Golden Boy" with good looks and keen insight. As an in-game color commentator, he’s a likeable guy equipped with a lot of knowledge and a desire to have as much fun as possible with his job.

While Herbstreit is a somewhat polarizing guy for Buckeye fans who often feel that he goes out of his way to sound unbiased on-air (not to mention a few too many "get your playmakers in space!" comments), I think he and Musburger actually work really well together.

Maybe I have good memories of this announcing team because ESPN GameDay games are generally exciting to begin with, but I'll always have good Musburger memories.  

 A SWAN SONG FOR DEFENSES. Bryan Fischer wrote yesterday about the recent trend that high-powered offenses have been able to compensate for mediocre defenses

We should also recognize that teams powered by their offenses are a threat not only to win games but win titles...Neither is the game of college football all about who has the best athletes; it hasn't been that way for years. But as speed and more accurate quarterbacks have transformed teams, the ability to get players one-on-one in space has worried the old guard that wants to control the clock, play defense and out-physical other teams.

A couple of things here: First, it's empirically true that great defense doesn't actually win championships any more than offense. Second, offensive and defensive schemes have battled throughout history for which side of the ball generally has the upper hand, as Chris Brown notes in The Essential Smartfooball. 

However, I'm not really sure Saban is necessarily quaking in his boots either. In fact, his use of Cover-1 robber and Cover-4 as well as hybrid athlete positions on defense have helped to negate the over-cited "ability to get players one-on-one in space" extremely well over the past few years. 

Anyone else remember a certain Rose Bowl a few years back between a certain high-powered offense and a killer defense that was built to defend the spread-to-run? 

 SOME LINKS POUR VOUS. (Please excuse my French). Another sign of the upcoming apocalypse... Read this and feel sweet, sweet schedenfreude... Football in SEC country looks kind of like this sometimes... Really awesome read on the Patriots no-huddle... A fancy pencil... Woohoo cfb memes... Phil Steele updates his bowl projections and the B1G has a sad...M ore coaching hotseat stuff... In case you forgot, the Buckeyes have a bowl ban this year, says the guy who refers to himself in third person

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