Eleven Warriors

Photo via @jgreen81

Former Georgia Tech receiver Jeff Greene will walk on to the Ohio State Football team, Eleven Warriors has learned.

Greene, a 6-foot-4, 210-pound wide receiver, played two years for Georgia Tech, seeing action in 12 games as a true freshman before emerging as the Yellow Jackets' top receiver during the 2012 season. He caught 18 passes for 284 yards (15.8 per reception) and two touchdowns for Paul Johnson's flexbone option attack, which prioritizes the running game.

In December, Greene and Georgia Tech parted ways. At the time, his high school coach, Chad Phillips of Starr's Mill, mentioned the Tech coaches had grown frustrated with Greene's effort and attitude and that he was "trying to help him get re-directed and get off the mat, find a place for him to go and proceed."

At Ohio State, he'll have that fresh start. Greene was in Columbus this week and met with the staff yesterday where he finalized plans to join the Buckeyes.

As a transfer, he must sit out the 2013 season and with NCAA scholarship limits still looming, he must also pay his own way, but he will be eligible to compete for a scholarship in 2014. He will then have two seasons of eligibility as a Buckeye.

With spring practice complete, it is time to turn back to outlining Urban Meyer's base Ohio State offense.

In my last such post, I examined Meyer's passing game philosophy and began diagramming the base pass plays that Meyer brought with him from Florida. I now want to continue this examination of Meyer's pass plays by looking at the follow-pivot, four verts and "Houston."

Note how in each play the ultimate goal is to use route combinations to create an area where the offense has two receivers against one defender. In so doing the offense can make that defender wrong every time. The offense does so either through a vertical stretch where two receivers are at different yard lines with one defender responsible for both, or a horizontal stretch where two receivers are across the field's width. 

It's good to be back. After football season ended in 2012, I went into an unofficial "retirement" from writing, due to an exhausted muse (or something like that). But as I am turning 49 today, it seems like a good time to get back into the ring, so to speak. And what better subject could there be than the 2013 season?

Sophisticated methods require much contemplation.

Over at ESPN, Brian Fremeau has a post where he uses his mysterious FEI to project the standings for the two Big Ten divisions in 2013. Since his analysis is behind the pay curtain, I thought maybe I could come up with my own fantastic formula that would reveal the blueprint for the next B1G season.

One of the factors that fearless prognosticators frequently use to predict success on the football field for an upcoming season is the number of starters returning. Now, this carries some inherent inaccuracy, as Adam Rittenberg points out. After all, the logic goes, if the team stunk last season, how much of a benefit is it that all the starters return?

To deal with this, I've added a success factor by multiplying the number of returning starters by the number of wins the team accumulated in the previous season. A returning starter from Ohio State's 12-0 team carries more value than one from a 2-10 Illinois team, I humbly suggest.

Then there is the potential impact of incoming recruits. To account for this, I have added in a factor for the total number of stars given to the school's class of 2013. I used Rivals for this analysis but you could pick one of the others if you wanted to try this at home.

The result of all this head scratching, soul searching, and naval gazing, is after the jump. Feel free to add your thoughts and criticisms in the comments. Don't worry, my feelings won't be hurt. Much.

Ever since Rutgers and Princeton got together on a muddy field in New Jersey in the fall of 1869, college football games have been won in the trenches. The cliché was born on that November day in Brunswick. And for the past 143 years, arguably no offensive lineman has performed better than Orlando Pace.

For that, he was chosen for induction into the College Football Hall of Fame as a member of the Class of 2013. Pace is the 24th former Buckeye to be selected for the Hall and the first lineman in more than a decade.

Before Pace even enrolled at Ohio State, the Sandusky native was inundated with lofty expectations. But he had little problem living up to them, even though he only stayed in school three years.

Pace remains the only two-time Lombardi Award winner. He was also a two-time consensus All-American, the winner of the Outland Trophy and fourth-place finisher in the Heisman Trophy balloting. That doesn’t include Big Ten freshman of the year honors and the Silver Football in 1996.

“Orlando Pace is not only the best offensive lineman I have ever coached, but he is the best I have ever seen,” said former Ohio State head coach John Cooper. “I don’t know how you could play the position any better than he did. He was just a fantastic football player. He was the best.”

As the offseason drags on, it seems Urban Meyer's Buckeyes are picking up more and more steam as the sexy pick to potentially topple [insert SEC team here] in the final installment of the BCS National Championship. 

Jerry Palm jumped on the bandwagon yesterday, predicting Ohio State and Alabama to clash in the championship, just about a week after Mark Schlabach vaulted the Buckeyes to the top of his Preseason Top 25. 

Yesterday, Dennis Dodd signed up for a Buckeye championship while Stewart Mandel chronicled Ohio State's undefeated 2012 campaign and examined how Ohio State could make a run at the crystal football this fall. 

A huge factor will be the strength of the offensive line and as Tom Herman noted, an even bigger factor could be Braxton's evolution as a passer and his increased understanding of the offense now that he's got a full season of its intricacies under his belt. That school of thought is bolstered by the reality that more than a handful of Meyer's previous signal-callers blew up in year two of running his system. 

Chris Leak, Alex Smith and Josh Harris all serve as blueprints for Year Two success and none of them were as naturally gifted as Braxton. Sprinkle in the plethora of weapons Miller figures to has at his disposal and the offense is primed to explode. 

Obviously, the defensive front seven is where the potential heartburn lurks though it's expected Noah Spence and Adolphus Washington will step up to fill big shoes vacated by Johnathan Hankins and John Simon. At linebacker, it sounds like fans are dying to be sold on Curtis Grant being at least serviceable but even if he isn't, there's no question Ryan Shazier is ready to push for All-American honors and not only that he's embracing the expectations and a potential chance to take down the SEC: 

"I hear about it all the time from my cousin -- SEC this, SEC that. There's one reason I came to Ohio State -- to beat up on the SEC."

[...]

"I'm not saying we're 100 percent ready yet... But once the season comes, we will be the best team in college [football]."

Emphasis ours.

One-hundred fourteen sunrises to go, y'all. 

Urban has been extremely candid about how and why the Big Ten has fallen behind the SEC in college football.

The Chase is on. 

There is simply no sidestepping the fact that the SEC has dominated other conferences, using almost any metric you care to look at. 

Urban has had enough with excuses - let's remove our illusions about the Big Ten, accept the fact that the SEC is *currently* a better conference, and understand how to fix the problem. 

Rather than being content with winning Big Ten Championships, Urban's staff created "The Chase" as the theme for the 2013. 

I have no desire to rehash others' arguments about when and why the SEC became a better conference, or make lame excuses about the weather to explain performances in bowl games. 

Instead, I want to take a look at what makes the Tide tick - what are their strengths and weaknesses? How do the Buckeyes match up?

In short, what are we chasing?

Make them Grind it out: 

Alabama led the country in fewest plays of 10+ yards given up. This isn't a perfect measure of defensive success, as Michigan's defense was best at limiting plays of 20+ yards (so obviously we should immediately discount this measure). 

Alabama has been known for its lock-down 3-4 defense, mixing cover-4, cover-1 robber, and zone blitzes to great effect. These defenses are known for limiting the run and shutting down big plays. 

Saban's defenses force opposing offenses to grind it out with long drives. Their slow grind score for 2012 was .18, meaning that they gave up just .18 points per play. That means that enemy offenses averaged 39 plays per touchdown scored. In comparison, the Buckeyes gave up an average up .32 points per play last season. 

Hi, welcome back to another Wednesday afternoon where we'll chitty-chat about this and that. Today's conversation will be recruiting, featuring the questions and queries from those of you who make this site the juggernaut that it is.

The Ohio State juggernaut, as powerful as it is, has seen a bit of a lull in the recruiting game these past few weeks. The last Buckeye commitment was Kyle Berger in early April and since then the Buckeyes have been hard at work trying to reel in their next wave of future Buckeyes. 

While April was tepid and May is likely to be subdued as well, the summer is coming and with it comes Ohio State's bread-and-butter: camp season and unfettered unofficial visits where players from all over the country can come check out what Urban Meyer is building in Columbus first-hand.

This version of the #11WRecruitingMailbag will start with the position that has seen the biggest recruiting developments in the last seven days, the Ohio State quarterback position. 

Ulyssesesque

When you're a kid, everything seems like it's forever. A trip to buy groceries takes forever. School never ends. Sunday afternoons are an eternity between the purposefully ignorant of responsibilities Sunday mornings and the cold sweat last minute panic of Sunday nights. It's always forever until Christmas, and when it finally comes, it's always another forever until your birthday.

But then you grow up, and you realize that life is transitory, and things end.

Bands you like will eventually suck, you'll eventually cease to be cool, and your goldfish is going to be so dead in about two weeks.

It's a depressing thought, and that's why we look for the constants in our lives, because we need to make sure that we're holding on to something tangible, something that won't eventually slip through our fingers.

The Ohio State football team went 12-0 last season, and for the past few months I've been doing is trying to think of ways that it couldn't possibly happen again.

We're past the offseason equinox, meaning we've made it past the midway point separating the 2013 BCS National Championship Game and the onset of the 2013 college football season. In anticipation of this upcoming season, Eleven Warriors has been providing a player profile of all the incoming freshman in Ohio State's highly touted 2013 recruiting class.

Darron Lee

The twelfth installment of the fifth edition of this now 24-part series, known to you as Better Know A Buckeye, profiles Darron Lee. Lee, an athlete from New Albany, Ohio (by way of Chattanooga, Tennessee), was a camp offer late in June. Having already accrued offers from multiple schools in the ACC and Big Ten (among other schools), Lee targeted the Ohio State offer as the one he really wanted. After a great showing under the watchful eyes of Ohio State's coaching staff, the coaches convened and agreed on extending an offer to Lee. He accepted immediately.

This story is retold in further detail below. Thereafter, I mention strengths and weaknesses I see in Lee, which leads to a projection of a redshirt in 2013. I provide film and miscellaneous things about Lee you may find interesting before concluding that Darron Lee is better known. He is put on the board accordingly.

Height: 6'3
Weight: 205lbs
Fake 40: 4.6
High School: New Albany High School; New Albany, Ohio

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Tryouts have never been an issue for Zach Boren. The son of one of Michigan’s all-time great defensive players and the younger brother of a Wolverine-turned-Buckeye, stardom has followed Boren throughout his football career.

At Pickerington, he was the defensive player of the year in the state, drawing scholarship offers from some of the best college programs in the country. Boren then became a starter on Day 1 at Ohio State. His four-year career included three and a half seasons at fullback with the final six games coming as the starting middle linebacker.

But now he’s in the unfamiliar territory of fighting for a job on the football field. Undrafted in last month’s NFL Draft, Boren signed as a free agent with the Houston Texans.