Despite the travesty of a National Championship Game, the 2006 Ohio State Football Season will always stand out in my mind as one of my favorites, mostly for sentimental reasons. That was the first year that I really followed college football. I had watched the big games in 2004 and 2005, but 2006 is really where my love of the sport first started. And for a kid who loved Ohio State, that was about as magical of a fall as you could dream up.

I recently came across the YouTube channel SteelBuck 6. This account has made 25-40 minute edits of hundreds of college football games since the 1970’s. As you can imagine, the account specializes in Ohio State games, having almost 200 games to rewatch for anyone curious. As part of this collection, the entire 2006 Ohio State season was condensed to these shortened, commercial-free games. I thought it might be fun to watch through the season again to see if the team was as good as I remembered, or if the Florida game was inevitable.

Troy Smith was Heisman favorite from the first game, and he did not disappoint. His first game against NIU seemed to be a harbinger of things to come, with nearly 300 yards passing, 3 touchdowns, no interceptions, 11.9 YPA, and a QB rating of 211.4. While 300 yards passing with 3 touchdowns seems pedestrian now, it was an exceptional performance at the time. The efficiency he showed that day is still considered remarkable. My dad and I walked out of the stadium that day talking about his chances to win the Heisman.

The second game of the year was against the pre-season #2 team, the Texas Longhorns. While the game was closer than I remember, it felt like an impressive win. Ohio State went into the game with questions at linebacker after losing AJ Hawk, Bobby Carpenter, and Anthony Schlegel from the year before. James Laurinaitis answered those questions after a 13-tackle performance with an interception and two passes defended. Beyond his performance, Ohio State kept a Texas team that was expected to be explosive to only a single touchdown.

The offense struggled initially, but eventually figured it out. After Texas tied the game at 7 with less than two minutes to play in the first half, Troy Smith led a quick touchdown drive to put the Buckeyes ahead for the rest of the game. Besides the outstanding defensive effort, Smith was outstanding again, throwing for more than 10 YPA. After this game, with the best offense of the Jim Tressel era and a characteristically excellent defense, a National Championship and a Heisman looked like destiny.

Troy Smith is still fun to watch fifteen years later. Colton Denning made a great highlight video showcasing what kind of a player he was at Ohio State. It is a lengthy video, but if you have time, it’s worth a watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnhX_2cuCK4

A couple of things stood out about him in 2006. For one thing, he had cut down significantly on the running. In 2005, Smith had the reputation as a running quarterback, gaining more than 600 yards with 11 touchdowns on the ground. In 2006, he only ran for 200 yards rushing with 1 touchdown. This was seen as a hugely positive development, as he seemed to blossom from a good athlete playing quarterback to a good quarterback in a relatively short amount of time. I think it is easy to forget now, but Troy Smith was a completely different player in 2006 than he was in prior years. While his mechanics don’t look a ton different, he looked calmer in the pocket, working through his progressions before making a strong throw, even under pressure. It always felt like he was going to make something happen. Purely in terms of watching as a fan, the only other quarterback that felt this inevitably successful was Justin Fields in 2020, particularly early in the year (the Indiana game always felt like he panicked because of Ohio State’s abbreviated schedule. If he wanted to win the Heisman, he needed to press). Everything was so controlled.

I still think Smith threw the prettiest slant that you will ever see. In the highlight video above, you can see him make short throws on target with velocity all over the field. While J.T. Barrett had a reputation as a guy that could distribute the football to his talented teammates, Smith probably did it better. He looked more like a point guard than a quarterback. The way the ball spun out of his hand was a thing of beauty. I still don’t know if I’ve seen a quarterback with a throwing motion that looked better aesthetically, even if it was a bit long.

The culmination of both his calm demeaner and his arm talent came with his pocket presence and with his ability to make plays when escaping the pocket. Arguably his two most well-known plays exhibited these qualities perfectly: the throw to Anthony Gonzalez late in the 2005 Michigan game and the deep throw to Robiskie in the 2006 Penn State game. While escaping from trouble is impressive enough, his ability to make huge plays when pressured was remarkable.

Of course, having two first-round receivers to throw to was helpful. Ted Ginn Jr. is still remembered today as one of the fastest Buckeyes ever, and Gonzalez was almost certainly the best slot receiver of the decade for Ohio State. Those two both had over 700 yards, which was plenty productive for the time. The next two receivers, Brian Robiskie and Brian Hartline, were good third and fourth options for the team as sophomores. While this receiving corps wasn’t as talented as the receiving corps that Ohio State has had every year since 2018, it was outstanding for the time.

Antonio Pittman isn’t mentioned with the great Ohio State backs, but he was a solid option in the backfield. He reminds me a bit of Marcus Crowley. I can’t point to anything physically that is extraordinary, but he never left yards on the field. A young Beanie Wells looked good in his limited action too, though he wasn’t yet the player he would become in 2007. Still, with these two, the backfield was more than good enough.

The defense was better than expected and was suffocating at times. James Laurinaitis was a big surprise after losing Bobby Carpenter, AJ Hawk, and Anthony Schlegal the year before. He led the team in tackles with 115 and interceptions with 5. A young Malcolm Jenkins had a breakout year at corner. Even though there wasn’t a true breakout defensive end, Vernon Gholston was a solid rusher with 8.5 sacks, and Quinn Pitcock was an outstanding DT with 8 sacks of his own. Each level of the defense had at least one standout.

The team tore through the rest of the regular season schedule before a classic #1 vs #2 matchup against Michigan which ended 42-39. I reiterate: this team felt like a team of destiny, especially after Troy Smith was awarded the Heisman Trophy after his magnificent performance against the Wolverines.

Then, the National Championship game happened, and the team of destiny was massacred, thereby starting the SEC dominance that the sport was known for in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s.

All these years later, that game felt like one of those “out of nowhere” games that happen occasionally, like Iowa in 2017, or Michigan State in 1998. My primary motivation for rewatching the 2006 season was to see if there were any signs that a loss of that magnitude was possible.

After rewatching all the games… yeah, maybe we should have seen that game coming. Or, at the very least, the game didn’t totally come out of nowhere. I don’t blame any of us for thinking that they were unstoppable, but there were some warning signs. Should they have lost that badly? No, but they certainly were not bullet-proof.

When I started to write this, I started talking about some of the first games that this team played but abruptly stopped. There were a few reasons that I stopped summarizing the season after the Texas victory. First, going into the season, Texas felt like the biggest roadblock to a championship. After beating them, the mindset of the fanbase was focused toward a national championship. The reason that the fanbase felt like this team could go undefeated is also the second reason I stopped going game-by-game for this review: the schedule was shockingly weak, even if it didn’t look that weak.

The first thing I remembered about the schedule in 2006 was that Ohio State played the #2 team in the country three times with games against Texas, Michigan, and Florida. On paper, that looks like a challenging schedule that would test any elite team. Yet, by the end of the season, only Florida would look like a great team, and we all know how that game went. It’s not unusual for teams to drop a bit; both teams ended up dropping significantly from number 2. To discuss their further rankings, I will use College Football Reference’s Simple Rating System (SRS) instead of SP+ for these ends of the year rankings, as SRS is based off who you played and how you played rather than SP+ which fundamentally is a predictive ranking based on how it expects you to play in future games. I will list both for a reference regardless. According to SRS, Michigan ended the year as the #7 team in the country, while Texas finished at #17. Furthermore, the next best team Ohio State played was Penn State who finished the year rated #31 in SRS after being ranked #24 in the coaches’ poll at the time of playing Ohio State, followed not so closely by #56 rated Iowa, who was ranked #13 in the coaches’ poll at the time of the game. Then they finished the year playing #3 Florida. At the time, many fans (myself included) expected that game to be a formality rather than an actual contest.

Picture an equivalent season, in 2021. From a fan’s perspective, it would be like beating Oklahoma State (#7) by a field goal at the end of the season, after a year with big wins against Wake Forest (#17) by 17 points, Tennessee (#31) by 22 points, and North Carolina (#56) by 21 points. Some of those games were a little closer than the score indicated. The Tennessee game only had 14 offensive points for the Buckeyes, but the two pick sixes made the score look good. Sure, none of these teams were top tier. I guess it is a bit of a concern that Ohio State only beat Oklahoma State by 3. It shouldn’t matter though. The National Championship game against Alabama (#3) should be a cakewalk. Phrasing it like this shows that my confidence at the time was misplaced. Of course, these rankings were done including the bowl games, but it was known even at the time that the schedule for the Buckeyes had not been overly difficult, and that only Michigan was a genuine challenge. With that level of uncertainty, fans (especially me probably shouldn’t have been as optimistic as they were.

Besides not having played anybody, the overall team ability probably wasn’t as good as many people remember it. According to SP+ and SRS, here are some other memorable Ohio State teams over the years compared with the 2006 squad:

The 2006 team really wasn’t that special compared to some of the other comparable Ohio State teams over the past twenty years. For SRS, anything between 20-22 is usually what the National Champion of any given year gets. Anything higher than that and a team looks dominant. The 2005 team was unlucky to have existed during the same season as the 2005 versions of Texas and USC. The 1998 team has Michigan State and Nick Saban to thank for not winning a national championship. The 2019 team with an SRS of 27.38 is one of the all-time great college football teams. Since 1975, the 2019 Ohio State Buckeyes have a higher SRS than just about anyone, including some of the all-time great teams: 1995 Nebraska, 1994 Penn State, 2001 Miami, 2005 Texas, 2005 USC, any of the Alabama teams from the 2010’s, 2018 Clemson, and even 2019 LSU. The only team with an SRS higher than that 2019 Ohio State team is the 2020 Alabama National Championship team.

This points to a greater point: winning a national championship isn’t just about having a team good enough to win it. It is also about matchups, luck, and opponents. The four best Buckeye teams of the last twenty-five years have all failed to win national titles, even with two of those teams being the best in the country, and one of those teams being one of the greatest teams of all time.

The 2006 team didn’t measure up to these teams. Still, the 2002 national championship was fresh in the minds of Buckeye fans, and that team wasn’t particularly incredible either (though their opponent in the championship, Miami, was a lot like 2015 Ohio State – talented, but not great). The 2006 team beat cupcakes soundly, but not overwhelmingly. They were good, as they had the 16th best offense with the 3rd best defense. They did not look like an all-time great team, so they were always going to be vulnerable.

It’s weird to say all of this about a team that seemed so good. Troy Smith was still incredible, right? Yes, he was an incredible college quarterback for 2006, but he would not look as good in 2022. Smith’s biggest problem was his lack of accuracy down the field, limiting Ohio State to an offense without a significant vertical component to their passing game. This sounds nearly heretical if you just remembered/watched the highlights, like I did. Most of his best highlights are of him making an incredible throw downfield. When watching the entire season though, he missed quite a few to a wide-open Ted Ginn, sometimes without a man within ten yards of him (see Texas, Penn State, and Florida games). Do you know how badly you have to miss to overthrow Ted Ginn Jr.? I did not have time to make a montage of these throws, but I was surprised how often he missed a wide open Ginn. I don’t have access to his downfield success rate, but the guy he reminded me of the most was J.T. Barrett. Yes, he had a better arm than Barrett, but when he threw downfield, it never felt automatic; it was always a bit of a gamble. He could run an offense with a lot of short passing, but he was not able to run the wide-open offense that Ryan Day likes to run. If Troy Smith threw like this in 2021, he would have been roasted mercilessly on the 11W forums, and people would have been calling for Justin Zwick to start. C.J. Stroud, even before his arm healed, never missed his deep balls as badly as Smith did regularly. 

This wasn’t exclusively a problem with Troy Smith, though. He won the Heisman for a reason – he was better than everyone else. Watch any of those teams from that era, and you can see that the passing offenses are really limited, as none of the quarterbacks can throw downfield with regularity. That’s not to say that these quarterbacks couldn’t be great; quarterbacks now are constantly involved in 7-on-7 drills and are in pass-first offenses from a young age. If you watch incoming freshman Devin Brown’s high school team, Corner Canyon, they are constantly throwing the ball down the field. That was not a viable high school offense twenty years ago; nobody could make those throws. Now, high schools across the country can have high-powered pass-first offenses due to the aptitude of high school quarterbacks.  It’s probably the biggest reason why defenses seemed to be so much better then. The only difference this makes in the national championship game is that Ginn’s injury probably didn’t make as much of a difference as people like to suggest – the deep ball wasn’t really used that often in Ohio State’s offense, especially in important games.

Despite his excellent season, his efficiency did drop a bit from 2005, when he averaged 9.6 YPA. In 2006, he averaged 8.2 YPA, which was lower than any year from Fields, Haskins, or Stroud, and it was also lower than Barrett’s two best years. Troy Smith was my favorite player growing up, and he still was incredible that season. However, I think it is fair to say that he couldn’t save a struggling offense afloat. Once the offensive line started to struggle, they had no shot in that game.

The defense also took a step backward from the year before, though not by much. While Laurinaitis was a great linebacker, the linebackers as a unit was not as good as 2005. Antonio Smith, despite being an awesome story and one of my favorite players from that team, was not as good as Ashton Youboty. He was picked on a bit against Florida. Here is their percentages of opponents averages allowed throughout the year (POSYPC - Percentage of Opponent's Season Yards Per Carry; POSYPA - Percentage of Opponent's Season Yards Per Attempt):

This stat is meant to be an opponent-adjusted metric for defensive success and was originally created by CFB Nerds on YouTube. Those numbers really aren’t that bad, but they aren’t incredible either. That 74% against the run is good, but not elite. That 82% against the pass is also good, but not elite (an elite defense would have a sub 65% against the run and a sub 75% against the pass). This was a good defense, but they couldn’t single-handedly carry an offense like the 2002 defense or even the 2005 defense. They were a very good defense, but they needed help from the offense.

I mentioned that there were some personnel issues that might have caused this, but the defense had a couple of structural issues too. The defense liked to play soft coverage, so passes underneath were effective against it. The NIU game was the first sign of this, when Garrett Wolfe ran all over the Buckeyes. They did well against Florida, but Florida didn’t even try to throw downfield. They just dumped it underneath the whole game.

Which of course brings me to my larger point: the game against Florida really wasn’t on the defense. 41 points seems like a lot, but Florida averaged less than 4 YPC and less than 6 YPA. That’s a bad day offensively. So how did they score? They scored using Jim Tressel’s way: field position. They started on Ohio State’s side of the field 5 times and scored 31 points off these opportunities. The three most aggregious ones were the second drive that started at the Ohio State 34-yard line, the third drive in the second quarter that started at the Ohio State 29-yard line, and the last drive of the first half which started at the Ohio State 5-yard line. They gave up 17 on these three possessions alone. When Florida had to start on their side of the field, they scored just 10 points all game.

Ohio State only had one possession start on Florida’s side of the field, and it ended with a punt.

Most frustratingly, Ohio State could have easily won this game, or at the very least have kept it close, if they were able to move the ball just a little bit. With a little over 2 minutes left in the first half, they had 82 yards. They would not get a single net yard the rest of the game.

It wasn’t like they couldn’t do anything, either. They couldn’t pass, that was true. Troy Smith was having a rough game, and the offensive line fell apart as the game went on. It was bad to the point that Troy Smith had a negative adjusted passing average for the game, with -0.7 AY/A. Still, they were quite successful running the football; more successful than they usually were, in fact. It’s just that they had absolutely no chance when passing the ball, and they couldn’t afford to only run the ball, especially when they got down.

Bill Connelly did a review of this game about a decade ago, and it is worth reading: https://www.footballstudyhall.com/2011/3/19/2050581/classic-study-hall-f... While it isn’t wholly novel, he points out that the only real mismatch was Ohio State’s lack of ability to pass, and shockingly, they had only 1 positive passing result in 20 attempts. That’s about as bad as you can possibly play. There wasn’t a player on offense who really had a good day outside of maybe Antonio Pittman.

So, could we have seen the Florida game coming? Maybe.

I don’t think anybody should have expected an easy game, though I might be overestimating how many fans were confident going into it.  Either way, Ohio State should have expected a hard-fought game, and they got something more disappointing. With an average offensive performance, they could have been national champions. With the Heisman winner at quarterback, this should have been achievable. Instead, the season of destiny ended with the most painful defeat in recent memory.

The 2006 Ohio State Buckeyes looked to be an all-time great one, but looking back at it, they were never one of the greatest teams. The team in the last ten years that they compare best to is probably the 2017 Buckeyes, though not as good. The 2017 Buckeyes had a better offense and a worse defense, but they were both balanced teams. Both were led by long-time starting senior quarterbacks. Both looked to be the best team in the country at one point in the year. Both teams lost a game that shocked everyone.