No, Losing to Virginia Tech Wasn't Part of the Plan; But the Buckeyes Might Be Better For It

By Patrick Maks on October 15, 2014 at 8:30 am
No, losing to Virginia Tech doesn't help Ohio State, but it's fundamental in understanding who the Buckeyes are.
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In retrospect, the precursor to Ohio State’s demoralizing loss to Virginia Tech was a perfect storm of events that swelled for a month before swallowing the Buckeyes up.

Take a young team trying to find itself and suddenly subtract its most valuable player from the mix. To replace him, insert a young quarterback who hasn’t played a snap of competitive football in two years. Ask him to make critical decisions, and place him behind an offensive line tasked with replacing arguably one of the best units in school history.

Ask him to spread the ball around to a band of unproven playmakers. Ask them to make big-time plays in a big-time game against a big-time program itching to make a big-time statement and return to national prominence.

“We were expected to beat Virginia Tech,” head coach Urban Meyer said during his call-in radio show two weeks ago. “And we didn't do it.”

Instead, the Hokies gut-punched vulnerable Ohio State and exploited its obvious weaknesses in a 35-21 win under the lights at Ohio Stadium.

This was Meyer, who said the Buckeyes were exposed, then:

“Pain of regret is phenomenal, and there is so much regret about things we could have done better to win that game."

And this is Meyer now:

“We're a young team that's getting older. You'd expect that, you'd anticipate that, but sometimes that doesn't happen. I think you see a lot of maturity starting to occur.”

Indeed, since that loss unexpected loss to a Virginia Tech team that now looks average at best, Ohio State seems to be humming on offense and finding its footing on defense after battering its last three opponents.

And to understand that turnaround, you must understand how the loss to the Hokies is fundamental in where Ohio State’s been, where it is now, and where it’s going. 

“It’s a big wake-up, it makes everybody hungry,” senior linebacker Curtis Grant said. “Everybody comes in and is willing to work and the competition in each and every room on our team is so crazy that it makes us want to come out and get better each and every week.”

But the wounds are indubitably still there to poke at.

Man,” Powell said. “It still eats away at me, but I feel like it made us better.”

But do losses really make teams better? Probably not.

The point of the game is to win, after all — and all the feel-good, narrative notions of growth, development, and forging character through adversity we hear teams talk of after defeat isn't exclusive to failure. 

But here, in this instance, and with this team, a loss might’ve reminded Ohio State of its mortality after a 24-2 stretch in two seasons. Victory became a guarantee — even after you would’ve thought losses to Michigan State and Clemson would’ve brought the Buckeyes back down to earth.

“Winning all those games before and going undefeated and all those things, it kind of made you feel like it was gonna happen,” Powell said. “Like, you’re gonna go 12-0. But now that we’ve suffered a loss, it’s definitely humbled me and made me just go back to my grind and work to be better so it doesn’t happen again.”

The Buckeyes also say they’re aching to prove they belong in a fluid, topsy-turvy national picture. Opportunity, they say, is knocking as long as they grow. 

“Coach preaches about the end of the season, that we need to be better than where we were at the beginning,” Grant said. “And if we continue to keep doing this, we’ll be pretty good.”

Meyer thinks so, too. 

"We're certainly nowhere near where we'll end up, in my opinion," he said. "We're still growing and getting better. We're a much better team than we were two weeks ago." 

And unrecognizable juxtaposed to that team that lost to Virginia Tech. 

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