10 Things We Learned From Ohio State's 56-3 Win Over Ball State

0:00for every song. Thank you London Children's Hello everybody, welcome to the Buckeye RTV podcast. I'm Tony Gurman. Here, as always, at the time for Tom. How's it going? Tony, we get to talk about a football game. We've already watched, but as always with these games, you see a whole bunch of stuff on TV that is very different than what you see when you're watching the game live. And, you know, there's certainly benefits to being there, but there's also benefits to getting a different look that you can rewind, which is more difficult to do in real life.

1:00Well, and I was sitting with Jack in the press box. I'm like, I can't wait to re-watch this so I can see exactly how many people are out there. Who's doing what? Because the way they were just flying in and out with subs was like, you can't keep track of it in real time. But there are some guys who stood out, and I guess we can start, I'll start offensively. And the standing out was not good in terms of the early on, the run blocking from the tackles, both Phil Abdanyl's and Ian Moore. I know Ian Moore or Phil Abdanyl is going to get the brunt of everybody's in vitriol because he did get yanked, but Ian Moore had some rough moments in this one as well. I think things got better as they went on, but this was definitely a learning moment. But there was one where O'Jackson, when he had to backtrack and the play got blown up immediately and he ended up losing 10 yards. Now, it was because Ian Moore didn't get a hand on anybody.

2:02And so there are just some of those things early on, and I know they all, things worked out and they had all their rushing yards. But we'll get into the rushing more in a bit, but I just thought initially a rough start for the tackles. And I thought Austin Servel did a pretty good job at right tackle in the run game as well. Yeah, I certainly watched it. I'm for those who don't know what I'm doing on game days. I'm down at field level watching the game through a camera lens, which on one hand is a very cool vantage point. But on the other hand, it doesn't let you get a great sense for it's not exactly watching the all-22 when you're trying to go, okay, where's the football and where's that guy running? And it's like, well, there's also 21 other people on the field going on right now. So I get a very different view. And so on the post game show, lots of people were talking about the tackles and I thought, yeah, I mean, I guess. And then you kind of watch the, you go back and watch it is like, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, yeah. I see what the concern is. Now, the interesting thing is I just recorded a Ross Fulton analysis episode where Ross

3:07is talking about the offense and where they were sort of struggling on the run game and all that. And so I'm going to be, I'm a lot smarter than I was about half an hour ago. And if you don't know who Ross is, Ross is one of our ski minciders at BuckeyeInsiders.com and does to the film breakdown shows that you can find on our YouTube channel as well if you just search Ross Fulton Analysis and Buckeye Insiders, you'll find that. He was talking about the fact that some of the stuff that was getting put on the tackles wasn't necessarily the tackles doing something wrong. Some of it was, it was, they were not, you know, they were not blameless. But also, some of it was, you know, a lot of the issues they had in the run game were just guys not staying on their zone tracks. And that's a, you know, that's something where you can, you let a guy go inside to it. It's like, why'd you let a guy go inside to it? Because that's not my job. You, my job is to do that thing. Don't do someone else's job. You do your job. So if you want to hear someone much smarter than me say that and do it with some video footage

4:07over top of it, no Tony, not you. You can find that on the Ross Fulton Analysis show on the, on the Ball State show, on the Ball State game that will be up on, I'm going to guess Tuesday morning or so on our YouTube channel. But yeah, it, I definitely understand some of the concerns and I saw them myself. It did get better in the second half. And so at that point go, well, what happened? Why did it get better? And it sounds like there were issues like significant, you know, tangible issues and those issues got addressed. Now, that doesn't mean they're fixed forever. But it was, it was not just Ball State got tired. There was sort of a why behind the run game getting better in the second half, which that should be, you know, that, that feels like that's sort of an encouraging thing going into week two for Ohio State. We all said I think was encouraging going into week two for Ohio State. Julian Sain. This is another one where I kind of had a sense that Julian Sain had a pretty good day, had a rough first drive, had two incompletions on that opening drive.

5:11And then after that was 21 of 23 for 320 yards and three touchdowns. And he was on the two passes that were incomplete were a pass that helped Bo Jackson in the hands near the goal line and a pass that Chris hit Chris Henry in the hands near the goal line. Chris Henry won that was the defender made a nice play on that one. So that was not, you know, that was not a pure drop by any means. But, you know, those were 23 balls. 21 got caught and two were, you know, in the hands of the receivers. So, you know, Julian Sain is back at it again. And, you know, I go, I go back to, you know, the concerns, you know, the concerns about the pass rush, the concerns about the offensive line on the whole and the, you know, the challenges ahead facing, you know, Colin Simmons arguably better than anyone on ball state. But, you know, he is going to be if they can give Julian Sain time, I think Julian Sain is going to be able to make some stuff happen on Saturday. But, man, I just, I look at the Texas pass rush, the Ohio State offensive line, just watching

6:15these two games together, I keep going, man, oh man, it feels like that's going to go a long way towards determining how this game goes. Yeah, and I feel like in these big games, the Ohio State quarterback is, is under fire quite a bit. And I'm expecting that same thing to happen in this one. You'll see some looks that he hasn't seen before. So, that will slow things down as well. But, yeah, in this one, and even, even the first throw to Jeremiah Smith, that was clearly like some sort of a miscommunication or, you know, that wasn't an accuracy thing. And the throw to Devon McEw and the second interceptors, that was just a deep ball. So, like, the most inaccurate throw he threw was like a deep ball that was maybe a yard or so ahead of Devon McEw and who they're still trying to. That was the first pass he had seen as a buck eye on the field in a game. So, like, yeah, he was, he was on point again and seems really, really comfortable climbing into the pocket, climbing out of the pocket, just finding area to throw. And, of course, getting his first career touchdown run as well, because he knew, like, all right,

7:19it's time to go. Nothing there. Let's go get it. And so, he ran to freedom and got that touchdown. So, it's really, really comfortable. And we talked about this in the Texas rewatch show that you guys all eventually see just two very comfortable quarterbacks in week one against their respective defenses. And, I want to go back to the run game real quick. I charted out the run formations and the yardage and where the success was. And I thought, you know, it was interesting because they had one explosive run more than 10 yards out of shotgun. And it was like, I don't know, 18 or so shotgun attempts. And I pushed this on the board and his roshville rightly points out, like, some of those are RPOs where you should also count the completion that comes along with that formation. We don't do that here. I didn't do that here. It's all time into this as well.

8:19So he's guilty as well. But just to see, like, in terms of the rushing yards, like, they got there, they got five four explosive plays out of pistol, one out of two out of shotgun. And then, you know, under center, they were pretty consistent average. And the six runs from under center were generally four or five yards every single time. But overall, like, a pistol nine attempts, 171 yards, 19 yard average. Now, it helps when you've got a 65 yarder and a 49 yarder in there, but, you know, shotguns 16 for 49. But also, there's several completions in there. So that's actually more. It's probably like 25 for, I don't know, 110 or whatever. Like, you got to factor that in. But I was surprised we didn't see as much under center as I thought we would. And maybe we were moving forward as long as they stay consistently able to move the ball.

9:22Well, I think what you saw week one is maybe only going to bear a passing resemblance to what you see week two. Because, and I think that's true for both Texas and Ohio State. I think pretty much everywhere team, both teams tried to put as little as they possibly could on film in week one. Like, you have to do something. You can't just run the same play over and over and over again. You have to do some different stuff. But in some cases, you're maybe setting up, hey, here's our tendency. Yeah, ready. Here's our tendency, ready? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you're going to do something different week two, you know, that. So you may have, I tend to assume that you're going to try more under center a little later on in the year. Because one of the benefits of under center is, yeah, you get the downhill running. And I think that there's something that's going to maybe be appealing to them about that in terms of what they might try and do against Texas. But it also sets up that real hard play action. And that's something that you're going to need to find your times to take your shots. And that's a way that you could maybe get, you know, you get a defender out of position.

10:23Maybe you buy a little bit of extra time for the quarterback in the pocket to have someone get open, you know, Jeremiah Smith on his long touchdown at the beginning. That wasn't out and up. So that's a little bit of a double move. And that's going to take a little bit of time. You've got to give Julian Sain three, four seconds in the pocket to be able to get that ball out. And so you're going to have to come up with different ways to do it. I think you may see, you know, you're going to see a mishmash, probably a little bit of everything on Saturday from from Arthur Smith. Because I think they probably are to a certain degree, still try to figure out, okay, what, what do they do best? What is really going to work the best? But I would, I'm guessing you're going to see more under center from them on on Saturday. One person who, you know, we talked a bunch on the post game show about Jeremiah Smith. We talked a bunch of the post game show about Dev McEwan. We didn't talk that much about Brandon and his and Brandon and his, it felt like he didn't play that much. He got, he went out at one point with an injury and I don't think you saw him much. I think you saw him a little bit after that, but not a ton. But he had a couple or a couple early catches, two, three early catches and then really didn't

11:25do much for us today. I did not realize how good one of his catches at one. He's going across the middle and it's like, boy, why doesn't it work? Brandon and his get more yards after catch. It's like, well, because Brandon and his is contorting his body and catching a ball that's below his waist and behind him and catching it and picking up whatever those yards are and then falling down and it's like, yeah, well, getting hit. Yeah, getting hit and like losing, losing his momentum by having to reach behind him and twist his body as he's going across the field one direction. You know, he, you know, I know that the yards for yards for catch numbers were not what people wanted last year, but man, he really, he catches just about everything. And that was one, it's just, it's one play. It's not, you know, this is not like some big overarching theme of the day or anything like that. But it meant that was one of those little things that got lost with all the other stuff we're talking about on the post game show. And I just, I saw that and thought, man, we, we at least need to sort of shout that out because that was a heck of a catch.

12:26Yeah, three catches, 36 yards. That was a really good catch. I thought they used him well and it didn't use them a lot because as you said, he only played so much. But even when it kind of is an outlet, there's nobody else around and flip it down to him and it's, it's 15 yards. And that's, those are free yards when there's so much attention on Jeremiah. Now that now you see like, well, there's going to be attention on Devon McEwan as well. There's a lot of opportunities for Brandon and his and if he's at 12 yards of catch this year, I think that's okay. That's, you know, we've talked so many, so often about how it was seven and a half last year and that's not okay. 12 is okay. They'd like it to be more and maybe it will be once some of that stuff starts sitting down field. But yeah, that that catch that you're talking about. Look, I think that was an RPO as well. And it's a quick decision, but it's a throw that was behind him. He held onto it. I think it may have been a third down as well. Gets hit, holds onto the ball and that's something that he's become known for and his career at Ohio State is picking up those clutch plays.

13:29Clutch is relative in this game, but like holds onto it, gets hit and holds onto it. So good start for him. And I think obviously you're only going to see more defensively, a lot on the defensive line. And if this is going to be by far the worst, I think offensive line at the I state faces this year. So just keep that in mind with everything that comes next. Tom Curry Wilder looks like a future number one overall draft pick. Now again, going against the worst offensive line, he's going to see, but there is one play where this is on the the countercluster, scrambled for first down, but the hip tosses the center with with his left arm and creates pressure and gets him out. We know he he created the pressure and that forced the intersection to TJ Alfred. He's quick, he's strong, he's a true freshman, but when we're going to talk about him more throughout the week and throughout the year and throughout the next two years after

14:32this, but man, what a start. Can't wait to see what it looks like in reality this coming weekend. Yeah, that was one I had written down as well. I had I did not realize that he was the one that caused the pressure on the interception that TJ Alfred had. Yeah, he was that was a great one. He split a double team on that one. He had two guys on him interior defensive lineman and split a double team, which, you know, I'm going to guess I haven't done the math exactly, but I'm going to get to ball state offensive lineman is probably approximately equal to one Texas offensive lineman. I don't I haven't done the math down to the decimal point, but you're probably somewhere in the neighborhood and, you know, it just the explosiveness, the speed, the fact that just they trust him to be out there in those moments this early, that tells me an awful lot because he was someone who we were talking about a bunch in terms of a guy who might be able to be an impact freshman coming out of high school. We talked about him some in the early spring. You saw some flashes during the spring game and then, you know, during fall camp, you

15:36saw some stuff. You heard some stuff as well, but it wasn't. He played a bigger role in game one that I was expecting. Now, we'll see how that carries over to game two, but the way they were using him, he was basically one of the starters in that rush man package when they bring him in when it's third Nate, you bring him in, he's someone who just they, he wasn't just well, they rotated him into the third quarter. I was like, no, he was just out there pretty much all day there. So, you know, this kind of goes into my next thing, which was boy, they missed a lot of tackles on the quarterback. Now, they're going to play a different type of challenging to tackle quarterback in arch manning this this week where he does not weigh 250 pounds, but he's a little bit quicker. Car while there might be quick enough to try and run him down or at least give that a pretty good give that a pretty good chase in the open field. But man, you watched guys bouncing off Calderick Luster. Remember the old Nintendo ice hockey game where you'd have the, you know, the skinny guys who are real fast, but they would fall down into how many hit him and you have the medium guys.

16:36And they were kind of like pretty good at some stuff, but you know, not phenomenal anything. And they had the great big fat guys who could, you know, the slap shot, you could, you know, wrink around the, you would go around the glass or on the ring because it was going so fast, but they were really slow. Calderick Luster was kind of a faster version of the big guys from Nintendo ice hockey, but it was just, you just saw guys like bouncing off of them or you know, you grab them up, no, he slipped out of it. That's going to be a real, real interesting storyline this week. How well does Ohio State tackle Archmaning when he's getting out of the pocket because he's, he is potentially dangerous with his legs. He did not run a lot in that Texas state game. Only three rushes in that one, but I'm guessing you're going to see eight, ten, twelve rushes for Archmaning in this game. And you know, does this look like, you know, even Carson Beck, who is not as phenomenal as a runner as Archmaning or not as dangerous runners, Archmaning. He had his moments where it's third and 11 and well, he got 11, he got 11.02 yards,

17:38but that was more than 11. And so they pick up a first down. Can they get Archmaning on the ground when Archmaning is running, whether those are design runs or just, hey, the play's broken down, I got to go make something happen with my legs. Yeah, we will see. I think probably easier to grab him and pull him down, but not easy to grab him and pull him down. I thought, happy, satan only had a good game. He was out there. He was physical. Maybe John Walker, more than anybody else was blowing some stuff up on the interior. You saw him kind of wrecking things. Things got collapsed. You'd see 55 coming out of there. This is by far Jason Moore's most impactful game. He had a tackle for lost where he was unblocked, but he still made the play on the mesh between the quarterback and the running back. That was good to see. But I don't want to make too much of it because this was again, the worst offensive line in Ohio State is going to see, but still good to see some stuff from the interior.

18:42And I'm not going to try to talk about everybody time, but also, you know, boy, watching TJ Alfred and Riley Penny Jen out there running around at TJ Alfred, specifically like, we haven't, we haven't talked about him enough leading up to the season, I guess, because, you know, he was doing a lot of stuff out there. Had the interception, but, you know, solid against the run was physical, was strong. He was not one of these linebackers that gets dragged down and, you know, the ball gets another yard after he hits them. So it was going to see those young linebackers, I thought. Yeah. And those are guys who are probably going to be called on to play a significant role this week because you are not going to be able to go 60, 70 snaps this weekend. It is going to be 102 in Austin on Saturday and at the previous game, which was earlier in the day. So it was a little hotter, but it was, I believe, 107 in Austin and the temperature on the field was 150 degrees, which let me tell you that reminds me, I need to start hydrating

19:42right now, like right this very minute. I need to start hydrating for Saturday, but it is, it's going to be hot on Saturday. And you're going to, your depth is going to be tested in a lot of different places. They were able to play a ton of depth in Ohio Stadium on Saturday and it was, you know, it was hot, but it wasn't, you know, it was 85 degrees, 88 degrees kind of hot, not 102 degrees kind of hot on Saturday in Ohio Stadium. And so yeah, you, they are going to need to play depth, but it feels like they kind of have an answer there at the linebacker spots where Riley Petagion, TJ Alfred, they both, you know, it was not, you didn't have the guy going out there and it's like, well, it's his first time out there and he's just kind of running around and he hasn't always doing like, you know, these guys played last year enough and they were, you know, rotation, you know, guys who are high enough in the rotation, Petagion missed the spring, but Alfred was there the whole spring and Petagion has obviously been there, rotating with the ones all through fall camp. Those are guys who look like they are ready to be bigger, you know, big time, bigger time

20:43players this year and that's good because they're going to need to be. This is not, this is not necessarily news to anyone else, but it was, I had seen the, the legend Bay catch. I saw that through my camera lens and watched him kind of, you know, make his way to the end zone, but also I didn't really have a chance to, you know, I'm looking at him through the lens. I'm not looking at all the other guys who are like, you know, he's, he's changing direction, but I didn't really have a chance to really appreciate it until I saw it later on in a replay. That was phenomenal, but the run, he had a run earlier, I think in the third quarter towards the end of the third quarter where he, it was the same thing. It was just he's there up. There's a defender and then whoop and then all of a sudden there he goes and that's something that we keep saying this, but that's something that they don't have other people on the team that can do that. And if they feel they can trust him and, you know, that this all goes back to the special team stuff, we'll see how much they trust him on kickoffs and what kind of decisions

21:46he makes if he's out there for kickoffs, but it just feels like they're going to have to put him in space because he could present a matchup issue with some of Texas's linebackers. Texas's linebackers, I think, are generally a little bigger. They had Tianthny, oh shoot, no, I'm bright, Tianthny Smith, I think, who left the team slash was told to leave the team during fall camp and he was one of the guys who was a little bit more of, you know, not, not undersized, but also not oversized linebackers. They've got a lot of 240 kind of linebackers on the team this year. That doesn't feel like a great matchup with a legend Bay coming out of the backfield in the passing game. The run game, I think he's going to present, you know, the challenges that he presents, legend Bay in the passing game this weekend might be kind of a watch this space kind of thing just in terms of the matchup. Who does Texas put on him if he's coming out of the backfield, you know, angle route wheel route, whatever it is? Well, and a lot of those passes, that, that play is for that running back.

22:46And so it's blocked for that running back as well. So the defense also has to handle that. So that's also something to keep in mind. It's very much like just, it's a hand out for this is designed. And everything is designed around this ball going right here, the same thing with some of those swing passes or whatever kind of pass that you're going to be throwing to the running back, especially him, you want to get him in the ball. It's designed to do that. So the blocking is there as well. And he just has to deal with that. So yeah, anything else, one of my notes here is, oh yeah, or a little. That was late second quarter. Like, oh, he's on this team too. Okay. All right. Well, let's see him do something in the coming weeks because there wasn't a lot for him to do in this one. KJ, Kenyatta Jackson, you know, got plenty of pressures there, including one from inside that I didn't even see, didn't see during the, the, the press box watch, the live watch, during the game, but saw it in this one. And he came really close quite a bit and some of those need to start hitting home.

23:47And sometimes they just, they just come in waves. But anything else from, from the game that you wanted to touch on? No, I did have the, the same thought about Earl Little, which reminded me of when we went to watch sunny styles play in high school against and, and Pickerington. I guess he was a central guy, right? Pickering Central was playing a very, very overmatched opponent. And so Tony and I are there all excited to watch sunny styles play safety. And I don't think the football got within 10 yards of sunny styles at any point during the game. And it was a little bit like that for Earl Little, where it was like, oh, man, I, you know, if the football goes near him, you know, he's going to do something cool. And then it just kind of never, never really got there. Nope. So those are our thoughts from the ball state game might be the, it won't be the last time we say ball state this season. But it's going to be the last time we spend too much time talking about ball state because now it is clearly Texas week. And we will talk with Ryan Day and we'll talk with the players throughout the week. And we'll talk with each other. It's going to be a grand old time. So if you want to continue to find us on video, you can do that at youtube.com slash at, at

24:52Bucka insiders. You're watching right now. Hit the thumbs up subscribe to the channel. If you're on mobile, go ahead and hype the video. That always helps as well. And of course, you can come find us over at Bucka insiders.com. Sign up, become a member. Talk about Texas, talk about Ohio State, talk about the season to come because it looks like it could be a pretty special way to that. We'll do it from here. Thank you all for tuning in and we'll talk to you later. This time, get out of the room. Well, she threw away the load to me. I wish it never meant nothing to me. Stay well, not stay well. Oh yeah,

25:53stay well, not stay well. If you tell me that tomorrow is alright, we can steal a car at least. You