It is July 1st, my Reds once again suck, and the recruiting in the trenches has me "full go" for another season of Ohio State Football. There will be countless threads in the coming weeks about what we want to see this year, so I'll go ahead with mine. Improved TD% in the red-zone. However, this thread is not going to be about the red-zone itself, and the schemes/execution that need improved inside the 20. Instead, this thread will focus on how scoring more touchdowns in the red-zone, can open everything up between the 20s. 

Red-zone success under Ryan Day

*insert picture of rollercoaster*. Few offensive stats have varied more under Ryan Day than red-zone touchdown %. 

*rank for this season excluded post-season

What is the goal

When I worked in the sport, the target was to always be >70% in redzone touchdown %. Why 70%? To put it as simply as I can, if you are at 66.7% that means you get a touchdown 2/3 of the time, and a field goal on the other 1/3. 17 points = 3 possessions worth of scoring. By targeting 70%, you give yourself some buffer room to account for the fact that a field goal can be missed (don't have to tell OSU fans that), or for a 4th down attempt that fails. 

If you look at the data, Ohio State has met/exceeded the goal of 70% 3 times. Interestingly enough, outside of the Covid shortened season which drastically impacted the stats, the 3 times OSU met this goal? Semifinal, Semifinal, National Champions. Furthermore, the 2019 semifinal loss can be directly attributed to OSU not meeting it's season long standard of Red-zone excellence. 

Impact outside of the red-zone:

The method for an inferior team to be a superior team has never changed. Shorten the game, prevent explosives, keep the game close, hope for a big play late. Tried and true formula that has helped underdogs win for decades. The "new" problem is that the new clock rules, and OSU's goal of slowing pace to limit wear and tear, has made this method even more attractive. 

Let's recap the Wisconsin game from last year. While the game ended in a complete blowout, you can see how "precarious" situations can be in possession limited games. Midway through the 3rd quarter, OSU had outgained Wisconsin 317 to 46, yet were only up 20-0 with Wiscy getting the ball back, mostly due to poor performance in the redzone. Obviously it didn't happen, but a touchdown and quick turnover has Wisconsin right back in the game. That is what nearly every opponent on OSU's schedule shoots for. 

In these 2 plays below, both occurring on the 1st possession, you see Wisconsin in highly conservative Cover-3. This is easy pitch and catch between Sayin and Smith. And they used this same concept all season long on early downs. 

Wisconsin knows they are giving up 5-7 every single time, but that is OK. Their goal is to make OSU execute as they near the endzone. And they nearly were successful had it not been for the best ball Sayin threw all year long. 

When a defense is playing so conservative, the only way you can generate big plays, are on pre-determined shot plays. These are long developing plays where one WR/TE baits a safety, leaving a corner/safety isolated. For example, this play in which OSU uses Max Klare and Jeremiah Smith to separate the safeties, giving Tate a one-on-one

Why this leads to long-term issues

With so many defenses giving OSU the exact same looks all season long, OSU's offense became very vanilla in the passing game.

Ball in the center of the hashes = 12 personnel. Go to side of the field with 1 less defender

Ball on the hashes = 11 personnel. JJ to the boundary. If single coverage, throw it to him. If double coverage throw it to the field side. 

Against inferior competition, these schemes worked with ease. In this play, you see Michigan commit a CB and a safety to JJ on the boundary side. This opens up plenty of green grass for the field side WR's to find an open spot to "sit down"

However, this "ease" ultimately came back to bite Ohio State. The very next week against Indiana, OSU would go back to the same exact scheme on their first 3rd and medium, as they had done all season long. Only Indiana wasn't content with being conservative. Cignetti's crew makes a late rotation, and the safety that appears would be double covering JJ, instead jumped the route on the other side of the field. 

The offensive line play was bad, but what equally lost the last 2 games is that OSU had spent 12 games running the same plays over and over again in certain scenarios. It worked against the teams that just hoped to keep the game within reaching distance. But when they faced 2 teams who were aggressive from the start, those tendencies were used against them. 

Tying it all together

It is hard to find blame on anyone for the scheme of last year. Defenses simply didn't challenge us aggressively, and OSU routinely took what the defense was giving. However, with a Freshmen QB, this led to issues as he was ill-prepared for what would come once elite competition arrived. One fix to these issues is the red-zone. Scoring TD's at a high clip in the red-zone will make defenses second think their decision to let OSU walk down the field. More aggressive defenses open up the playbook for the offense. With how conservative some of these Cover-3s were against OSU, there are only a handful of routes that actually work. You can't really do anything other than throw it to the wide-open WR 5-7 yards down the field. A freshmen QB isn't learning anything from that. We don't like mistakes, but at the end of the day, had Julian been pressured into some of these mistakes during the regular season, he would've had a chance to learn from them before it was too late. In addition, Ryan Day and Brian Hartline could have been forced to add a little more creativity to the playbook.