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This Week in Buckeye Football: Week 1 at Virginia Tech

The offseason can seem interminable, even when you get the spend the entire time reliving a championship season from the year before. After watching everybody else take the field, we finally got to see the Buckeyes. What can we take away from this game?

Top Plays:

3.) Michael Thomas: perhaps the most underrated player on the team, and in the country.


2.) We've seen this a million times before from Elliott. It never gets old.


1.) Braxton broke the internet on this play. The only reason it's not already the play of the year is that he'll keep getting the ball.


Takeaways:
  • It was the first game, and it looked like it. We tend to think of this team as a continuation of last year's team, and with so many key players coming back it's easy to see why. It's a new team though, players added, players departed, a coordinator change, some position changes and some depth chart shuffling. There are things to be worked out, and it's rarely a seamless process. When I say that, I'm referring to discipline, mistakes, AND playcalling. Despite the Buckeyes being down at halftime and fans pulling their hair out, they cruised rather comfortably to an opening win on the road against a tough opponent. While we know the Buckeyes didn't play to their potential, I challenge you to name a playoff contender that was more impressive in week one. It's also worth noting that Urban Meyer's teams tend to improve dramatically as the year progresses. His best teams have struggled early sometimes, but become a juggernaut by the end of the season. Given where they're starting right now, if they follow that same trajectory they're scary.

  • The part of the narrative coming out of this game will be that the outcome would've been different had Brewer not been injured. That possibility cannot be discounted - the fact of the matter is he had played 6 quarters of football against Ohio State in his career, and Virginia Tech had mostly gone toe-to-toe with Ohio State in that time. Part of being the better team though is having better depth and being better prepared than your opponent. It's true that the Buckeyes have been spoiled and enjoy luxurious depth that is perhaps unprecedented in the history of college football. That's not an accident though. One only needs to look back to the QB era prior to this one, when it was Kenny Guiton backing up Braxton Miller. Guiton was never as highly regarded as any of the QBs the Buckeyes are currently playing, but he was always prepared and was able to come into the game in situations like the one that Tech experienced tonight and and keep the offense running. Instead of looking at is as a "yeah, but," national pundits would do well to look what happened to Brewer and Virginia Tech as another example of what sets Ohio State apart from the pack.

  • Special teams are a problem, and I'm not sure it's a matter of it simply being the first game. Ohio State doesn't kick much besides PATs, but there doesn't seem to be anybody that can be trusted at the moment. That includes Cam Johnston, who has gone from being one of the best punters in the nation during his first year to inconsistent at best at the moment. It seems a lot of his punts are going about 40 yards and taking a big 10-20 yard bounce backwards. That's not a bad thing when you're punting from your opponent's side of the field and trying to pin them deep. It's a killer though when you're punting from inside your own 15. Also, how does a team that has 85 scholarship players not have a single one that can reliably field a punt? It's easy to blame Jalin Marshall for being suspended, but he's been shaky back there too. At least the kickoff coverage was on point like it was all of last season.
 
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Agree on the special teams part of what you said (well all of what you said really but really agree with your ST comment).

If this team is going to lose it will be because of two reasons. A) they turn the ball over too much and B) our special teams as you said is a problem.

Our coverage units are OK but we kick the ball out of bounds every 5 kicks or so and when you score a lot of TD's that's a lot of kick out of bounds. Whats odd is we normally give up points when we kick out of bounds as well (similar how our Red Zone defense is a concern of mine). As you said we can't field a punt to save our lives and While Cam is good when punting between the 40's he's not very good in just cutting it lose when we're backed up.

Besides ST play my biggest concern is our defenses inability to bow up when they're forced into a tough spot. Whether that's turnovers by the O or poor kicks by our punter whenever it happens we tend to give up points with regularity and for the life of me I can't figure out why? What's even more concerning is we tend to give up TD's in these scenerio's.
 
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