Ok, please don't blast me for this one, but I'm going to play devil's advocate for a second.  What if the Buckeye's really aren't the best team in the country? What if the Finebaum callers are right? What if what we saw against Hawaii and NIU is what were going to see for the rest of the year? What if...

Again, this is me playing devil's advocate, so I don't necessarily believe it. But it's always a healthy exercise to analyze your enemy's criticisms and see if they carry any real weight. So for a second, let's just look inward, not with an unbiased eye, but with a biased eye against our beloved Buckeye's. If the "what if" questions above are correct, why would that be the case? Well here's some concerns worth thinking twice about...

1. Wide receiver play. Outside of Michael Thomas, we don't have any true wide-receivers that can do the two critical things Meyer wants them to do: spread the field vertically, and block, block, and block some more. Evan Spencer, Jeff Heuerman, and Devin Smith were the perfect combination for this, and going into game four, it seems like the replacements are lacking significantly, especially with blocking. Do you really think Meyer and Co. haven't previously in fall camp stressed the importance of perimeter blocking to the WR's and TE's? It's completely feasible that they just aren't that good at it.

2. Football is a delicate game. A team game. All eleven doing their jobs working toward a common goal. This delicate balance and be easily disrupted, and have a dominos effect of sorts. With a lack of perimeter blocking, the running game looks average. With an average running game, defenses can worry about the pass more. Additionally, with an average running game, 3rd and long situations tend to occur more. With defenses not worried about explosive running plays as much, and a lot of 3rd and longs, the QB's aren't playing so well. Their experience an increase of bad situations - this could be a big reason why both QB's aren't playing their best. And it's not so easily fixed either.

3. Additionally, in baseball and football we talk all the time about how pitchers and QB's can have success early, and then opponents get enough tape on them, and figure them out (think RG3 year one). What if this is happening to Cardale? What if he really isn't the super hero QB we thought he was, and what if defenses are figuring him out? Two things made Cardale have success last year... a stellar running game and a big deep threat. Johnny Manziel had a running game and threw a few successful deep balls last week, and even he finally won a game in the NFL. 

4. Tommy Schutt. The only defensive player not to grade out as a champion last week. Wow, that must not feel very good if you're him! Also, he must not be playing very well if he's still getting left out like that. Makes you wonder about the interior defensive line. With Ohio State's lack of elite competition so far, we're still left to wonder a few things. One of them being, if Ohio State played a huge and excellent offensive line, with a bruising back like let's say Derrick Henry, could a team expose their defense? This defense looks lights-out right now, but their run defense hasn't been tested like it will against Michigan State, and possibly other teams in the playoffs. Tommy Schutt's lack of success is concerning, and therefore the run defense might be as well.

5. Lastly, and this one is an easier fix than the rest (Urban Meyer comes to the rescue), but what if Tom Herman was really really good at what he did for us? It's already known that his absence is leaving a huge void, and at the moment Ed Warinner is attempting to fill it, but not very successfully. His duties are now offensive play calling as well as still coaching the offensive line. And what specifically is struggling right now? The offensive as a whole, and the offensive line play. This unit really has no excuses. They returned 4 of their 5 starters and plugged in a senior at the right tackle position, who in all honesty, hasn't been the issue thus far. So, maybe Ed Warinner is just being spread too thin? Maybe, he hasn't focused on the o-line as much, which has led to their lack of superior play. Maybe, he's too focused on learning the new art of play calling. And maybe, he's just not that good at it - after all this is a new skill he's learning, a rookie of sorts. 

These are all real issues that the team is dealing with at the moment, and I believe they are all fixable. In Urban I trust, so I try not to have too much anxiety about what's going on at the moment. That being said, he doesn't win the National Championship every year, and there have been in-season issues he hasn't been able to fix before (i.e. the pass defense in 2013). Now hopefully the devil's advocate in me is a freaking idiot and wrong about everything - but that's the beauty of this football season, of any football season, nobody knows for sure how it's going to all play out. Full disclosure, I live in Arizona, and the National Championship Game is here in Glendale this year, so I hope to hell I'm wrong about all this.