Fifty-Five to Life

Our obsession with hindsight leaves no tragedy unpreventable.

If you could just go back and just do a couple things differently, disaster averted - right? Whether it’s not botching a crucial coffee date with the earth angel who you let slip away, slowing down the Titanic as it breached that ice field or killing Baby Hitler back in 1889, we’ve nailed the fantasy of getting it right long before we ever knew what would go so wrong.

This ex post facto precursor for enlightenment is hardwired into the lyrics for I Wanna Go Back to Ohio State (we shout-sing this with friends and strangers on fall Saturdays, which is how you know it’s good science). We’ll win the game or know the reason why. Once we know that reason, we’re only a time machine away from being the hero in the disaster movie who saves the world from despair and eternal regret.

This valuable science fiction could even be applied to almost any football loss. Almost.

Glendale, 2007. Keep Troy Smith in playing shape throughout the 51-day banquet season. Install a team policy that only allows for fist-bumps to Ted Ginn Jr. when he scores touchdowns. Run the ball out of every formation and keep Florida’s offense on the sideline longer. Give the Buckeyes a fighting chance.
New Orleans, 2008. Keep the ball in Beanie’s hands. Stack the weakest DL of the Tressel era with its strongest LBs to avoid being gutted into oblivion with dive plays. Don’t rough any punters. Run the ball out of every formation and keep LSU’s offense on the sideline longer. Give the Buckeyes a fighting chance.
Michigan State 2013 & 2015. Run the ball out of every formation, especially with running backs that no human with pain receptors would want to tackle in the 4th quarter. Don't clench.
Virginia Tech, 2014. You know what? Let’s leave that one alone. It's fine.
Iowa, 2017. There it is. The almost.

This might be the disaster impervious to time machine meddling, alongside a 63-14 punishment in State College back in 1994. Hawkeyegeddon happened between the Buckeyes' game of the year when they knocked off No.2 Penn State in a comeback for the ages, and an absolute throttling of No.12 Michigan State. There was no long layoff, no rash of injuries - and no formidable opponent.

That loss made no sense in any context. Trap game doesn't do it justice.

Last year’s Buckeyes won the Big Ten and the Cotton Bowl while ending a generational losing streak to Southern Cal. Their quarterback will be a school and conference record-holder literally forever. Talent-wise, you would need both hands, both feet and someone else’s spare hand to count the number of future millionaires on the roster. They took down Michigan in Ann Arbor for the sixth time in seven visits.

And they allowed 55 points to a program notorious for centering the field goal on 3rd down.

Nothing else jumps off the 2017 team’s autopsy report; the bar is just too high to be dazzled by a seventh-straight finish atop the division anymore. That double-nickel in Iowa City overwhelms every other bullet point while joining 41-14, 313 and 2-10-1 in the pantheon of triggering Ohio State numbers.

Iowa was at 99% in the 3rd quarter.

So how would you kill this particular Baby Hitler? Swinging a 31-point deficit carries a degree of difficulty that extends far beyond just having a time machine at your disposal. First, navigate back to when the Buckeyes were screaming through an ice field on the verge of taking over that game and stop Nick Bosa from removing himself from it. Iowa doesn’t reach 55 points with Ohio State’s best player participating the entire afternoon.

The entire defense shut down once the ruling on the field was confirmed. That 31-point deficit isn’t gone yet, but it’s lower. Reversing the Hawkeyes best performance of the past five seasons is trickier than correcting one errant and devastating head butt.

Next, fray the thread that ties together nearly every loss of the Urban Meyer era in Columbus, which is mystifying ballcarrier distribution. J.T. Barrett had one less carry that every running back had, combined. The following week against Michigan State, Mike Weber and J.K. Dobbins did not have fewer carries than their quarterback - and they combined for 286 yards. Try to remember who won that game.

Against Oklahoma in September Barrett had more carries than Weber and Dobbins combined. The following game this was corrected. In lieu of walking through every loss of the Meyer era and the game that followed it, this mistake/correction in backfield ball distribution is a recurring and maddeningly predictable theme.

But that's still not how you lose by 31 points to a five-loss Iowa team.

Hawkeyegeddon happened within a year of losing by 30 to Clemson, but the Tigers a) won the national title and b) were pretty good at scoring 30 points with regularity. With an offense capable of being even mediocre that evening in Glendale, the Buckeyes' point total gets crooked and Clemson's comes down a little. That beating wasn't in the same galaxy as what went down in Iowa City.

The 55-point game is forever, nearly impossible to second-guess, and will serve as a cautionary tale for years to come about what could happen on any given Saturday. The lessons from that game can be used to pre-fix the ones yet to be played. It's a classic control-the-controllable exercise, and the cheat sheet was written decades ago by Woody Hayes: