Ohio State Football Notebook: “It’s a bitch. It sucks.”

Gotta Get Down

Ohio State quarterback Will Howard played his best game as a Buckeye Saturday night in OSU’s 32-31 loss on the road to No. 3 Oregon. Howard completed a career high 28 passes in 35 attempts for 326 yards with two touchdowns and no interceptions. He also rushed for a touchdown.

It was his final rush, however, that everybody will remember. Trailing by a point in the final seconds of the game, Howard dropped back for a quick pass, but didn’t like what he saw, so he stepped up into the pocket to get enough yards to attempt a game-winning field goal.

The play began with six seconds on the clock. There was still a last tick remaining when Howard began his slide and his teammates were signaling for a timeout, but the clocks did not abide and the game was over.

After the game, Howard was asked about his slide and whether he thought he got down in time.

“I thought I did, obviously didn’t,” he said. “I’m worried about trying to get enough yards to make the field goal and get us in the field goal range, but we gotta go back and look at it and figure out what we did wrong there and I gotta get down, I guess.”

Asked to process the ending of this game given his stellar play throughout, Howard was honest.

“I don’t know, man, it’s a bitch, it sucks,” he said. “Play like that, like that, it’s just, you don’t wanna lose a game like that. And I don’t know what we could have done better. I could have gotten down earlier, gave us a chance, it would have been a longer kick. But we gotta go back and look at it and try to not let it happen again.”

Too Many Explosives

Coming into Saturday’s game against Oregon, the Ohio State defense hadn’t given up a single pass play of 30 yards or more this season. By halftime, they had given up three.

Ducks quarterback Dillon Gabriel threw for 341 yards and two scores on the Buckeyes, attacking them with more deep shots than he had shown in other games this season.

The Ohio State defense ultimately allowed completions of 26, 28, 32, 32, 48, and 69 yards.

After the game, OSU defensive coach Jim Knowles took the blame.

“We didn’t execute,” he said. “Coach speak, but we didn’t execute. We’re doing the same things, but when you play a better opponent, you gotta raise the level of our game, and I just felt like our guys, we just need to coach them better.
We need to get them in better positions, focus on the details. Make sure that this loss doesn’t beat us twice. Fix the problems, coach harder, work harder.”

While Knowles may take the blame, it was senior cornerback Denzel Burke who took the brunt of Oregon’s attack. He was successfully thrown at by Gabriel all game long.

What is Knowles’ message to Burke after such a tough outing?

“I would just tell him he’s a great player and that we love him,” Knowles said. “He knows and they all know all the bad plays go on me. He, me, the whole defense, we need to learn from it. We’re going to get more chances, so we’ve got to take that away and we’ve got to find a way to get better.”

Be Aggressive In Moments

It wasn’t just the Oregon offense that had success on the night. The Buckeyes had 10 pass plays of 15 yards or more, though nothing more than 38 yards on the night. Ohio State running back TreVeyon Henderson also rushed for 70 yards on back-to-back carries of 17 and 53 yards.

It wasn’t a perfect night for the Duck defense, but they weren’t expecting it to be.

“I think sometimes when you play an offense like this, your first answer is you want to be aggressive and take away everything and we knew that if we played the game like that, that we were going to give up some explosive plays, so we wanted to wait,” Oregon head coach Dan Lanning said after the game.

“We wanted to take opportunities to pitch to them. And I think if you look really, their offense was in rhythm, probably at times maybe better even than ours. I think they had a lot of first downs, it wasn’t like bleeding slow death for us, we wanted to be aggressive, but aggressive in moments. And, look for the right time to throw haymakers and making sure we limited explosive plays.”

Both teams did a solid job of answering the other, but ultimately it was the Oregon offense and defense that had the final answers.

“The defensive staff did a really good job of calming ourselves and not feeling like we had to be extremely aggressive in moments when it didn’t dictate those moments,” Lanning said. “You have to be able to win up front to be able to do that, you got to be able to do more with less, and we had some guys in front that did more with less tonight.”

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