[Eleven Warriors, since I'm quarantined, I'm going to be posting some of my musings about recent Ohio State teams on the forum. This is a long read, but I'd appreciate any feedback you could give and let me know if you'd like to see more like this.]

I must be honest, Buckeye Faithful. Our 2018 team was robbed. We, as fans, were robbed.

Here's what we already know: Our 2018 offense was absolutely loaded, and with Ryan Day at the controls, basically unstoppable unless we stopped ourselves. The defense was talented at key positions, but lacked discipline, preparedness, and ultimately cost us a shot at a national title that we sorely deserved. A lot of the blame rests squarely at the feet of one Greg Schiano, the defensive coordinator for that much-maligned 2018 defense, as it rightfully should. But to this day, I believe that the 2018 team was much better than advertised, and the 2018 defense was much closer to being great than we thought, with only a couple of key exceptions. 

First of all, bigger than the Zach Smith fiasco and the Urban Meyer suspension, though those did play a role, was perhaps a bigger calamity: Nick Bosa's groin injury. I'll never get over this. From his first play against Oregon State to his last one against TCU, Nick Bosa was just unblockable. It might be blasphemous to say this now, but I think a complete 2018 from Nick would have been Chase Young-esque. I still remember how he knocked 3 QBs out of 3 straight games. And that Rutgers tackle that claimed Bosa wouldn't get a sack on him. My god. We missed out big-time. 

We were robbed of having the best defensive line in college football that year. We were robbed of seeing more than 3 games with perhaps the best two defensive ends to come out of Ohio State starting on opposite sides. We don't talk about that enough. Coming into the 2018 season, everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, was talking about Clemson's monster defensive line, and how it was by far the best in college football, and with good reason. But in those first three games, with Bosa and Young, screaming off the edges, beating each other to the quarterback by fractions of a second, experts weren't so sure. 

Im sure some will disagree but Ohio State has the best DL in CFB. #buckeyes #OhioState https://t.co/hbb2cIZs1x
— Daniel Jeremiah (@MoveTheSticks) September 2, 2018

We had a formidable front four of Bosa, Young, Dre'mont Jones, and Davon Hamilton. Bosa, Young, and Jones were so good that for an offensive line to double any of them was just suicide because the others would win so easily. There was nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide. It was just a meeting at the quarterback, every snap. 

But then, after the defensive line's heroics won us the TCU game, Bosa got injured and everything changed. See, losing a solid starter can hurt even the best teams a ton when it comes to their season. But losing the best player in college football? A team captain? The man that the defense itself was built around? That hurts immeasurably more. Not just because it hurt our defensive line, but because it changed the identity of our defense entirely. 

See, Greg Schiano is not a dumb football coach, regardless of how the team might have played in 2018. He started looking at the defense for 2018 in the 2017 offseason and didn't like what he saw. Apart from the defensive line, he saw a linebacker room that lacked a reliable Jerome Baker or Raekwon McMillan that would clean up everything in the tackle box. He saw a secondary that lacked, for the first time in forever, a bonafide shutdown corner that could be put on an island. He was concerned, deeply concerned. And so, the defensive line became the identity of the defense. Everything was shaped around not giving the quarterback any time to throw the ball. The linebackers were pushed up to the line of scrimmage for the SPECIFIC reason of getting the defensive linemen 1-on-1 matchups that they would win easily. This is how the team practiced the whole offseason. 

And then the scandal broke, and the fiasco happened. I'm not going to rehash the events that transpired, or their validity, but what should be universally agreed upon is that the timing going into the season could not have been worse. It broke during fall camp, the time that is most critical going into a season. This is where everything is polished until it shines, from plays, to fundamental tackling, to schematic adjustments. And to be honest with you, I don't blame Schiano one bit for the team not staying focused during this time. It's one thing for a suspension to happen going into fall camp. Then, the coaching staff can get together and come up with a plan, something to stick to. But with this scandal, there were bombshells dropping left and right every single day. It's just impossible for a team to stay focused when their leader is under such fire. What happened in fall camp 2018 was truly unfortunate, but it wasn't Schiano's fault. 

And still, the team was fearsome and fiery to open the season, though cracks were visible under the surface. Until the Bosa injury. Then, our defense was put under the microscope and weaknesses emerged and were magnified tenfold. Suddenly, we had nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide from out deficiencies. We had linebackers and corners that couldn't cover and a defensive scheme that couldn't cover up their deficiencies any longer. But how do you throw out a scheme that the team had been working on for months? You can't just go back to the drawing board during the middle of the season, there are games to coach! So Schiano soldiered on, duct-taped the defense together, and hoped it wouldn't fall apart. 

For the most part, given the circumstances, Schiano delivered. Our three best opponents during the season were Penn State (whiteout game), Washington (Rose Bowl), and, of course, TTUN. In those games, Schiano's defense gave up 26, 23, and 39 points respectively, though TTUN scored 20 of those during the fourth quarter when the game was clearly over, after we held them scoreless in the third quarter, so they really scored 19, of which 7 came from a fluke muffed punt. I was absolutely dreading the PSU whiteout heading into it. I thought McSorely, Hamler, Friermuth and Co. were going to do filthy things to our porous defense. But somehow, we only gave up 26 to them. Schiano's unit came ready to play for those games, no doubt.

To me, Schiano failed once on the year: the Maryland game. I'm still not sure how this game happened; it feels like a weird dream to me. Maryland didn't have a bye week to prepare for us, and their program was also in chaos after the whole strength coach incident. They figured out the best way to attack the defense and they had a very talented running back in Anthony McFarland Jr, a guy that had offers from every school in the country. It was also just a really unfortunate game; every time we clawed our way back into it, Maryland got a lucky break, like Dwayne Haskins throwing a pick-6 off a deflection, or a Maryland player fumbling the ball into the endzone where another Maryland player picked it up for a touchdown. The defense just didn't make any plays to win this game, whatsoever. A complete failure on Schiano's part in that game.

But what about Purdue? Purdue was.....an interesting game to say the least. But Schiano's defense did not lose us this game until the game was already lost. The reason that we lost against Purdue was because the offense failed spectacularly through three quarters, and in basically every single way it could have. Our offensive drives through the first half went: 3-and-out due to penalty, decent drive killed due to penalty, FG after missing on 3 goal-to-go downs, promising drive killed due to penalty, missed FG. That's not football, that's agony. And moreover, it's the worst game that Ryan Day has called in his time at Ohio State. Through this time, Schiano's defense gave up only 14 points while we were constantly handing the ball back to Purdue. Once the second half started, Haskins started missing all of his receivers, drives ended sooner, and Schiano's job got even harder. Only halfway through the 4th did Schiano's defense start giving up long touchdowns. Then we started scoring, and after each touchdown, on-side kicked the ball giving Schiano only half of a field to defend. It was an impossible task, only accentuated by a long Rondale Moore touchdown and a Dwayne Haskins pick-six to cap it off, both once the game was already lost. A dismal, devastating performance, but more on the offense than Schiano for sure. 

When I watched the College Football Playoff from home that year, I cursed Schiano's name because I believed that we should've been there, and it was his fault that we weren't. It's obvious to everyone that we would have put up a much better fight against Bama or Clemson, and I would have paid large sums to see a crazed, revenge-focused Urban Meyer prepare for a revenge date with Clemson. We definitely had the athletes to compete with Bama and Clemson that Notre Dame and Oklahoma didn't, even if they weren't always in the right places at the right times. But that's a hypothetical for another time.

Buckeye fans, as you remember the Golden Age of Ohio State Football that we're living through right now, you might be tempted to disregard 2018 as a wasted year of a championship-caliber offense, sandwiched between a season of lows (2 losses LOL) and a season of triumph (we lost, I guess?, to Clemson but earned respect that we hadn't had since 2016 back). But when you think about 2018, I'd think about it as a season that never was meant to be, but almost was, something special. 

Don't worry, I'm writing a whole post just for The Game in 2018, if that's something you all are interested in.