In a game that saw Ohio State rally from a two-touchdown deficit before ultimately collapsing, the Buckeyes lost, 35-21, to Virginia Tech Saturday night.
It was the first loss at Ohio Stadium in the Urban Meyer era and it’ll surely send the head coach’s crew plummeting in the national polls. A chance at a spot in the college football playoff seems like a pipe dream, too.
Because without Braxton Miller, Ohio State’s defects are magnified sans the star quarterback. But Meyer, who vowed a refocus of culture and clarity of purpose last spring, said he wasn’t going to blame any one position group for the gutting loss.
“The thing that's going to be real obvious the way we operate, there's not going to be this guy's gotta do better. We're not going to do that -- where do you put the blame or something. We don't blame people. We just gotta get a lot better. And that starts tomorrow. We had a good meeting as a team. You really find out about people. And I have a lot of confidence that some of these young people, now they're veteran guys, that are going to get better and better each week. We just have to do a better job. I know that sounds redundant or coach speak, but I'm not sure what else you say. You're surely not going to say, the quarterback's a product of the offensive line. We also had some dropped passes. We had all kinds of issues that we have to get a lot better at.”
Meyer said Saturday’s outing was surprising and disappointing.
“A little bit surprised. I thought our skilled guys would perform better. I thought we'd protect a little better. A little bit disappointed. I don't know, coaches don't get surprised, get disappointed. And obviously we just gotta work a little harder, and I still have confidence. We have enough skill on this football team to get by people. It didn't look like it, but we have to get by people or you're going to see what you saw today you'll see every week."
Meyer said redshirt freshman quarterback J.T. Barrett gave a “gutsy effort.”
“They played zero coverage. I don't think our wide receivers played well. We dropped a touchdown early in the game that would have you start hitting some of those like we did, it puts them in the zone coverage. And that happened, I can't remember, I think it was the third quarter we started hitting some plays. Had a couple of speed options. Had a couple of passes caught. Mike Thomas turned a short one into a long one. That's what has to happen against a zero, that's a good secondary. Coach does a nice job. That was zero man most of the game, and they put your corners on islands that we didn't expose it. And then we miss a couple of protections and you're on our backs. Gutsy effort by our quarterback. Obviously not good enough, but a quarterback is a product of those around him, and we all have to get better.
For the last six months, we were told Ohio State’s wide receivers were supposed to be an upgrade from a year ago. It didn’t happen Saturday. Meyer had but one thing to say.
“Very disappointed.”
Outside of Barrett, the Buckeyes had just 15 rushing attempts from Ezekiel Elliott, Curtis Samuel and Rod Smith. In particular, Ohio State chose to not run the ball inside.
“Everybody was within six yards of the line of scrimmage. We tried. There's two unblocked defenders standing right there at the point of attack. We did get some option -- one thing the option does, it equalizes one defender and we had a couple of big hits, one touchdown by Zeke and some plays in the option game. But there's no inside run game when they do that. And it happened a little bit our first year.”
For Meyer, though, it came back to lack of production from weapons on the outside.
“It happened the year before we got here where there's not enough confidence in our skilled athletes. And we worked so hard, recruited so hard. We gotta do better and win some matchups. That's what it comes down to is winning matchups.”
Meyer was pretty blunt about Cameron Johnston’s shanked punt early in the game, which set up a Virginia Tech touchdown.
“Don't punt the ball 24 yards. So we've got to work on that. Don't punt the ball 24 yards.”
In the offseason, Ohio State’s pass defense underwent an “overhaul” that was supposed to help cure it of defects that doomed the team last season.
But at times against the Hokies, the Buckeyes got carved apart by quarterback Michael Brewer. Virginia Tech converted 9-of-17 third down attempts, too.
So...what happened?
“I'll give you more on that tomorrow. I didn't watch a whole lot of the defense. We were trying to adjust to a brand new (defensive scheme). They played bear defense, no deep. That's what Cal did us against a couple of years ago. Unique defense that you have to expose them in the throw game or it's going to be tough to run. I'll give you all that conversation, I guess, whenever the next time we meet. But to tell you I didn't see a whole lot of it because I was working on offense."
Luke Fickell said the defense “couldn’t get it done when we needed to.” Specifically, the Buckeyes got slaughtered on third down. Why? Fickell said it was the difference in the game.
“Ah, man. I don’t know. No excuse, you know? You didn’t do it last week maybe? But that’s nothing. They made some plays, we lost leverage, it’s not like we weren’t pressuring them: we were coming after them, hitting them. They rolled the pocket a little bit and made some plays on us. Ultimately when you look back on that, that’s what killed us … it’s not like the were third and two or third and threes, we’re talking third and eight, third and 10, third and 12 in the ideal position you’d want to be in. We didn’t execute.”
Tom Herman said Ohio State couldn’t run the ball because of Virginia Tech’s Double Eagle, Cover Zero scheme.
“It’s damn near impossible.”
Junior linebacker Joshua Perry said the Buckeyes remain optimistic about the future despite the crushing blow to their odds of playing for a national title.
“It’s a long season, anything can happen. There’s a lot of games to be played across America and we just gotta wait and see. We gotta go out there and play Buckeye football and if we do that, we’ll put ourselves in a situation where something -- we don’t know what it is yet -- but we’re hoping … We’re gonna go to work every day. Ohio State’s Ohio State. We’re a highly ranked team all the time, we get good guys so we just gotta put in the work. We got to go on about our business as professionals and if we do that, we can be really successful.”
Defensive lineman Adolphus Washington said Ohio State struggled to put it together when it needed it the most.
“I felt like as a whole team we all didn’t play good when we needed to play good. We had spurts where we did good, but it just wasn’t at the time when we needed it."
Curtis Grant said Ohio State needs to regroup fast from the loss. He said the locker room was a somber place after the game.
“It’s very quiet right now, but it’ll change tomorrow. Everybody’s hurting right now but if we live in the past, there’s no telling what could happen to us. But if we prepare for the future, we’ll be all right.”
