Buckeyes Moving On From Loss, But The Memory Will Remain

No loss is easy to accept, and during a season, those losses generally have to be moved on from rather quickly. For the Buckeyes, however, their loss at Oregon last weekend has been followed by an off week, which means that they get to sit home and stew just a little bit longer.

Usually, a team that loses has to get right back on the horse because there’s another game coming in seven days. The loss must be shrugged off because if a team carries it into the next game, they’re going to lose that one too.

The Buckeyes, meanwhile, had no such game to prepare for, and instead they’ve spent some time looking in the mirror.

Ohio State head coach Ryan Day took part in his radio show on Thursday and was asked how he keeps the team from getting “too down” following the tough 32-31 loss to No. 3 Oregon.

“It’s okay to get too down early on,” Day admitted. “One thing about being in a bye is, like I said Tuesday, we’re not just going to come out here and just move on. I know the sun came up, but I just wish we wouldn’t have lost that game. And it just hurts. And it’s going to hurt. That’s just the way it goes. But at some point you’ve got to move on. We did that yesterday. We came out and we said, ‘Okay, here’s the plan moving forward. Here’s the path moving forward. This is what we have out in front of us.'”

Nebraska is next up for the Buckeyes. Then Penn State, Purdue, Northwestern, Indiana, and Michigan. Oregon isn’t on the schedule — at least not without Ohio State winning out and meeting them again in the Big Ten Championship Game.

There are other games to worry about right now, so the Buckeyes will move past the Ducks, but it won’t be something they forget about any time soon.

“That game is not going to be something that we’re going to reference a ton, but it’s going to stay in the back of our mind and we understand that if we don’t do the things that we talked about, this is the result,” Day said. “That’s everybody in the building. But it’s a combination of those things. I think having a bye week allows you to kind of chew on it and work on it and try to work out some of those issues more than if you didn’t have a bye week, for sure.”

The Buckeyes were back on the practice field this week, and they put their respective moods to good use.

“No, I think the guys, that part of it, they’ve been great. Their attitude, they’re edgy. We’re all edgy,” Day said. “Coaches are edgy. That’s the way it should be, on edge right now. And it’s just, you get that awful taste in your mouth, and so it’s just going to be like that all the time, which it’s been, by the way. It’s not like, you know — this is not a wake-up call at all. Guys have been going after it. We’ve been playing hard. We’ve been doing those things.”

Playing hard wasn’t enough for Ohio State last week, which means it may not be enough the next time they find themselves in a close game. The Buckeyes lost the turnover battle last week, lost the rushing battle, and lost the battle of explosive plays — and it led to a one-point loss on the road to what is now the No. 2 team in the nation.

Had the Buckeyes just won any of those three areas of the game, maybe they win the game itself. Or if they would have simply performed at their best when they needed it most, they’d still be undefeated today.

“We’ve got to find a way to win the game in the fourth quarter, and those are the things that we’ve identified that we’ve got to do a better job of,” Day said. “We’ve got to take care of the football. We’ve got to win the rushing yards. We’ve got to hold them to the less X-plays than we did. Now those aren’t the only areas. We’ve got other things that we’ve got to clean up as well. And winning the game in the fourth quarter is what it’s going to come down to in some of these bigger games.”

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