Urban Meyer has rebuilt Ohio State’s traditional run-first power offense into a dynamic power spread over the past three years. The offense basically rewrote the OSU record books in 2014 en route to the first ever College Football Playoff championship.
While the offense under Meyer and former offensive coordinator Tom Herman turned the Buckeyes into one of the greatest shows on turf, not everything has gone the way they envisioned over the last three years. Meyer abhors turnovers, yet Ohio State has not been very careful with the football in the Meyer era.
Let’s compare the past three years under Meyer with the final three years with Jim Tressel at the helm from a fumbles perspective, throwing out the lost 2011 season between the two.
The Buckeyes have fumbled 61 times over the last three years, losing 35 of them. That’s more than 20 fumbles per season, which is kind of high. In fact, the Buckeyes were 115th in fumbles lost in 2014, coughing it up 24 times and failing to cover it on 14 occasions.
Let’s compare that to the final three seasons of the Tressel era. During that time, Ohio State fumbled 42 times and lost just 16. So, why did the team lose nearly as many fumbles during its championship run as it did in the last three years under Tressel? Is the offense a high-risk one?
Not necessarily.
Sure, the Buckeyes run a lot more plays where the quarterback must decide whether to keep or give and if he should pitch it or run. There are a lot of passing plays, exposing the football via a vulnerable quarterback in the pocket. That might explain part of it.
But that’s just it. They’re doing more of everything.
Ohio State is running more plays per game under Meyer than it did under Tressel. More plays means putting the ball at risk more often. The Buckeyes averaged 73.3 plays per game in 2014, compared to 68.9 per game in 2010. Five extra plays per game doesn’t sound like much, but Ohio State also played two more games in 2014 than in 2010.
That’s about 204 more plays over the course of a season, and it stands to reason that more turnovers would occur. But it doesn’t explain the disparity completely.
So maybe the offense is a little high-risk/high-reward compared to what it was. Or it just could be that Meyer is putting players on the field earlier in their careers, with freshmen and redshirt freshmen regularly getting touches. Tressel was much more reluctant to play underclassmen.
It’s really all of these things. But the Buckeye offense certainly has been anything but boring, even with a few extra mistakes.
