After he finished speaking to reporters, senior linebacker Curtis Grant grabbed his things and made his way toward a corridor of stairs that would lead him down Ohio State’s somber locker room.
“Excuse me, excuse me,” he said while politely trying to cut through the masses gathered in this small chamber inside the southeast corner of Ohio Stadium.
Before he exited, though, Grant picked up a stat sheet off a table detailing a 35-21 loss to unranked Virginia Tech. He opened the door to the hallway and walked down the steps, but his eyes never left the little piece of paper in front of him. He mumbled to himself. He shook his head once.
After all, this was raw, cold, hard evidence of how the Buckeyes collapsed at home for the first time under head coach Urban Meyer, how the Hokies bludgeoned their way to 9-of-17 critical third-down conversions and how Ohio State’s national championship aspirations now seem like a pipe dream.
“It’s very quiet right now,” Grant said of the team’s locker room following the game, “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.”
The defense – the one Meyer said underwent an offseason overhaul – wasn’t quite as porous like late last year, but it wasn’t much better.
Virginia Tech quarterback Michael Brewer carved up the secondary for easy gains underneath coverage and zipped balls left and right to wide-open receivers with room to run. Sure, Ohio State’s pass defense might be better by November, but it looked very much like still a work in progress Saturday night.
“We’re not gonna change who we are. We’re an aggressive defense, and we’re going to keep being aggressive and we’re gonna make plays, Grant said. “Our time is gonna come.”
But what better of a chance to showcase all that improvement than a primetime bout in front of a record crowd of more than 107,000 salivating fans who were hoping to finally repress memories of defensive collapses against Michigan State and Clemson last season. The Buckeyes squandered it.
“We couldn’t get it done when we needed to,” Luke Fickell, co-defensive coordinator and linebackers coach, said.
In particular, Ohio State's inability to halt Virginia Tech on third down proved to be fatal.
“Ultimately when you look back on that, that’s what killed us,” Fickell said. “it’s not like they were 3rd-and-2s or 3rd-and-3s: we’re talking 3rd-and-8, 3rd-and-10, 3rd-and-12 in the ideal position you’d want to be in. We didn’t execute.”
Added Fickell: “They made some plays, we lost leverage, it’s not like we weren’t pressuring them: we were coming after them, hitting them.”
Indeed, Ohio State’s defensive line controlled the line of scrimmage for much of the game and the defense as a whole had bright spots. But the Buckeyes said it would be a faster, nastier defense that wasn’t going to let teams throw for chunks easy yardage like last year. Brewer and the Hokies proved that’s not the case, at least not yet.
“I felt like as a whole team we all didn’t play good when we needed to play good,” defensive lineman Adolphus Washington said.
“We had spurts where we did good, but it just wasn’t at the time when we needed it.”
Because, sure, there's growing pains and kinks being worked out with the defense. It’s Week Two. Installing an entirely new system is hard. We get it.
“The reality is, we need to execute regardless of what you’re playing,” Fickell said. “I think our kids understand the basic concepts of what we do and when it got down to the situation, we just didn’t execute.”
For a team that wants to be considered among college football’s elite, though, that’s not good enough.
