Winning a national title certainly has its share of perks, but is also rife with potential pitfalls.
There is perhaps no better example of that truism than Ohio State football in 2015. After finishing on top of the college football mountaintop last season and returning virtually everyone, the Buckeyes came into this year as pretty much the consensus top-ranked team in the country.
Players were lauded by students on campus and fans within the broader sphere of Buckeye Nation. Local and national media hyped many of them to be virtual shoe-ins for numerous postseason awards. The expectation and subsequent narrative was that head coach Urban Meyer had all the tools in place for a repeat appearance in the College Football Playoff.
But oftentimes the combination of being the top dog and having all this praise heaped upon you day in and day out leads to a shift in mentality. The biggest challenge, especially for a coaching staff, is to keep their players hungry and motivated on a weekly basis. After all, their opponents will have no shortage of motivation to be that team which knocks them off their pedestal.
To put it simply, complacency is the enemy of champions.
Ohio State Buckeyes Victim of Complacency in Loss to Michigan State
And it could be argued that such complacency had reared its ugly head at different times for Ohio State this season. Saturday’s losing effort against Michigan State was merely the latest and, ultimately, most damning iteration. In a game that had its fair share of conference and national title implications, the Buckeyes came out sluggish and looked borderline unprepared at times. This especially rang true on the offensive side of the football.
How bad was it? Ohio State finished with a grand total of five first downs. J.T. Barrett threw for all of 46 yards, had a long of just 16 and finished with a Total QBR of 16.1. And perhaps most troubling, after 15 straight games of 100 or more rushing yards, Ezekiel Elliott finished with 12 carries for 33 yards even though he did have one of the Buckeyes’ two touchdowns in the eventual 17-14 defeat.
The 132 total yards was OSU’s lowest offensive output since October 1, 2011, a 10-7 loss to, ironically enough, Michigan State, when they were only able to muster 178. Now it must be said that the Spartans deserve a great deal of credit. They did a great job at shutting the Buckeyes down and winning the battle of field position late which set up their game-winning field goal. That said, a team with the weapons Ohio State has on offense doesn’t turn in a performance with as much ineptitude as we saw last weekend without them not having a razor sharp mental and physical focus heading into the game.
That lack of focus and sense of complacency appeared evident with the coaching staff as well. The play-calling on offense was vanilla, predictable and didn’t give the team a good enough chance to win down the stretch. Elliott, you know, that same Elliott who averaged 232 yards per game in those huge final three contests of 2014 and was named offensive MVP of the CFP title game, had two carries in the second half.
Two.
To put it bluntly, that’s unacceptable. Honestly, how can we be at all surprised Ohio State’s 30-game Big Ten winning streak is no longer and its CFP hopes are all but dashed?
Elliott came under a lot of scrutiny after the game when he openly criticized the coaches’ in-game play-calling. Say what you want as to whether it was appropriate or not, the fact of the matter is he had a valid point and if the media’s gonna ask the kid about it in the immediate aftermath of a tough loss like that, of course he’s going to vent.
I don’t think there’s a more clear-cut example of what Elliott was getting at than the Buckeyes second drive of the third quarter. I’ve included the play-by-play of what would end up being a five play drive that ended in a Cameron Johnston punt below.
(Play-by-play screenshot via ESPN.com)
I don’t know about you, but four straight Barrett run plays isn’t exactly opening up the playbook. Fortunately for Ohio State, Michigan State’s Macgarrett Kings, Jr. would muff the punt and give OSU a goal-to-go situation that they would eventually convert to take a 14-7 lead. It would obviously be the Buckeyes’ final score in a game that had fans really scratching their heads all day long as to what was going on offensively.
Time To Move On and Focus on Michigan
Despite the disappointment, the team has to move on and shift focus to that all-important showdown this coming Saturday against their hated rival in Ann Arbor. The Buckeyes will be heading into the Big House to take on a Wolverine team that may have a higher level of motivation than MSU had at the Horseshoe. Coach Meyer is well-aware of the need to put the setback against the Spartans behind them as a rivalry clash with a lot on the line looms.
“Obviously, we’ve got to move past a very, very tough loss, and (we have a) big game this week,” Meyer said in his opening remarks in Monday’s press conference. “(It’s) one that we all take extremely serious around here, and one that we cherish to be a part of.”
Michigan was expected to be improved under first-year head coach Jim Harbaugh. But I don’t think very many people had them at 9-2 heading into this game with an outside shot at a Big Ten Championship game should they win and get help by having Penn State upset their rivals from East Lansing. They also harbor a slim yet minimally tangible chance at making the College Football Playoff but would need a lot of help. It’s beyond the scope of this article to elaborate on those permutations.
Meyer isn’t at all surprised at the revival of UM’s football program under Harbaugh.
“I think they have excellent players. They are well coached,” Meyer noted. “I have always you know, checked the recruiting. I remember hearing well. They just don’t have the personnel. I am thinking, wait a minute, they have great personnel. Whether they are always playing great or whatever, that’s a different answer, and obviously, they are playing very well right now.”
If you’ve been following the buildup to this game at all, you’re pretty familiar with the Harbaugh-Meyer connection both with this rivalry and with each other. The two were born at the same hospital in Toledo, OH roughly six months apart. Harbaugh starred at quarterback for the Wolverines while one of Meyer’s first coaching jobs out of college was working as a graduate assistant for the Buckeyes.
Harbaugh’s arrival to the scene in many respects resembles that of the man who coached him while he was at Michigan, Bo Schembechler. His first year as Michigan coach came in 1969, one year after Ohio State had won a national title. The Buckeyes returned a plethora of talent and looked like a surefire team to repeat. The Wolverines came into their matchup against OSU with two losses.
Sound familiar?
Michigan would end up pulling off the upset leading to an era that would end up being referred to as the “Ten-Year War.” It was a period where both schools played each other extremely evenly over the course of a decade. Schembechler would end up with a 5-4-1 record against legendary Ohio State head coach Woody Hayes.
In order for Meyer and this year’s incarnation of the Buckeyes to avoid a similar fate, they’re going to need to involve Elliott much more in the offense than they did against Michigan State. Barrett will need to rekindle the touch that had him as a legitimate Heisman candidate as a redshirt freshman. And OSU’s vaunted front four will need to get regular pressure on quarterback Jake Rudock who has a fairly scary stable of speedy, athletic and lengthy pass catchers including tight end Jake Butt and wideouts Jehu Chesson and Amara Darboh.
In certain respects, this game could serve as a means of putting what happened last weekend behind them. What better way to move on from the catastrophe in Columbus than to have a bounce back in the Big House.
You need only mention the two schools involved and even the neutral sports fan knows this is one of those rivalries that transcend not just college football but American sports in general. It becomes that much more mouthwatering a spectacle when both programs are relevant on a national scale. Given that Saturday afternoon’s game involves two top ten teams, it certainly didn’t take Harbaugh long to reestablish such relevance to the Wolverine program.
Brace yourself, college football fans. Meyer vs. Harbaugh Part I should be a good one.
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