After my defensive analysis was complete, I figured that I could make an offensive one since I had already watched the game over several times. Besides, watching the offense was a lot more fun than the defense. I know it’s late and we’ve moved on to Tulsa, but the work was already half done, so why not? While this side of the ball still had issues, they looked to be related to lack of experience, rather than complete misunderstandings or issues with execution.

Once again, this format is borrowed from MgoBlog, which has a similar feature. Their most recent one is listed here for Michigan if you would like some situational awareness: Upon Further Review 2021: Offense vs Washington | mgoblog. It is also incredibly informative for improving football knowledge.

Before posting the chart, I wanted to make a couple of clarifications. First, plays were my best guess, as I am not an expert on football plays. Most of my knowledge comes from plays I recognize from NCAA 14, with some background reading articles posted on this website over the last ten years from Kyle Jones and Ross Fulton.

I also put offensive line protection in its own category. If a guy lost a battle, I docked him for it, but if the protection was good all around, I put it in its own category. This makes the grading a little weird. I will have to adjust this if I do it again in the future.

Points were awarded for strong blocks, good decisions, and gaining more yards than anticipated. I also usually only gave points if they were part of the point of focus of the play. While blocks away from the ball and good routes from non-targeted receivers are important, I only had so much time to grade the offense.

Feel free to skip the play-by-play if you just want to see the takeaways. This is just to show my work.

For the offense, here’s the play-by-play:

Much less worrying than the defense, but some concerns are still there.

First, let’s address the concern about the running game. The offense average 4.1 YPC in this game. That’s not great, Bob. Here is the data for how the team performed in the run game, including blocks and gaining yards after the catch:

I don’t think it was particularly as bad as 4.1 YPC suggests. Why did they struggle running the football?

For the first half of this game, Ryan Day and Kevin Wilson were willing to try to run the ball against Oregon’s front for a couple of clear reasons. First, Oregon primarily ran two formations the entire game: the 3-3-5 and the 2-4-5. Both of these formations, as you will note, have effectively a front six instead of a front seven. More simply, they are trading a linebacker/defensive lineman for a defensive back, trading some advantage against the run for an advantage against the pass. As a quick note, this is similar to the change to the defense that Ohio State made this past season, opting for an extra safety-hybrid instead of a linebacker.

If the formation were the only issue, Ohio State may have not run the ball as much as they did, but Oregon was also missing their two best players on defense: Justin Flowe and Kaivon Thibodeaux. I think Day and Wilson thought they could smell blood in the water when they saw Oregon’s small, injured front. The mitigating issue for Oregon, and one of the reasons why they could stop the run, is that they regularly would add a safety to the box, and sometimes bring the slot cornerback over as an overhang defender. Additionally, Oregon sold out for the run pretty regularly, wanting to force CJ Stroud to beat them with his arm. There were multiple times early in the game where Ohio State would be in a Shotgun formation with three wide receivers, and they would run against an eight man box. This essentially means that each receiver was one-on-one with a defensive back, and Ohio State chose to run. Now this wasn’t all on the coaches, as Oregon disguised some of these and only at the last moment stacked the box, but it did show that Oregon wasn’t going to be beaten on the ground. For example, on the first drive of the game with 11:59 left to go in the first quarter, Miyan Williams got the ball on a mid-zone call where he lost three yards, due to eight men crashing down against the run. I didn’t think any of the linemen or the tight end did particularly terrible. They blocked fine. There were just two unblocked defenders that could get to Williams right away.

This was kind of the story of the first half. As the game went along, the eight man boxes or course got less and less common, as Ohio State started to pass the ball with more frequency. This had opened some space up for the running backs, but at this time in the game, the offense needed to score and score quickly, as they didn’t know if the defense could hold up at all. Furthermore, the passing offense was genuinely effective. Day and Wilson could lean on the passing offense after the first quarter because of the success they started having.

The offensive line didn’t get a ton of push all day, but the stacked boxes were a big chunk of the problem. Petit-Frere had a couple of nice blocks on mid-zone, providing huge cutback lanes for the running backs on multiple occasions. Munford was there too. I didn’t see too many positives from the rest of the line regarding the running game. Jones had a couple of very effective blocks, but was inconsistent. The best one was with 9:45 in the fourth quarter, where he pushed his man eight yards down the field. He had another one with 12:21 to go in the third quarter, this time for only five yards. He also blocked air on a couple of other plays where the run got blown up, like with 9:40 left in the third quarter. The play before he struggled too, slipping and not getting a hand on any one. Additionally, the two false starts called on him were rough.

The offensive line, even though I don’t think they were awful, did have some issues. The running backs did not have a ton of success running up the middle, particularly when Wypler or Johnson were involved with the blocks. Wypler got very little push throughout the day, and was subject to getting bull-rushed. He did make a couple of nice plays sealing off a defender, but he certainly wasn’t mauling people. Johnson probably had a worse day. In the third quarter, with 3:50 to go, Ohio State faced a 4th and 2 in the Oregon red-zone. Oregon dialed up a blitz, and Johnson doesn’t recognize it. He continues double-teaming the guy Wypler is blocking while a linebacker has a free lane to hit Stroud. This was the borderline pass-interference on Olave, but if Johnson had picked up that blitz, they would have had a much better shot on this fourth down.

As for a more positive thing to say about them, they were pretty good in protection all day, for the most part. The Johnson one not-withstanding, I don’t remember a real pressure on Stroud until late in the fourth quarter. They gave him time to throw all day, and Stroud didn’t hold on to the ball much at all. To summarize: this looks like a line full of tackles. They can pass block really well but haven’t been as great at run-blocking. I think there is cause for optimism though, as everyone on the line is new to their position, and they didn’t play horrible.

The running backs played well. Williams is always getting five more yards than I think he should, and it makes a huge difference for the offense. I think Henderson tries too hard sometimes to hit the homerun; the screen pass he had was a good example. If he keeps heading straight he gets another ten yards. Instead, he tries to cut hard, and slips. Still, he is so elusive and has some good size too. With 5:43 left in the third quarter, he had an 11 yard run where he was first hit in the backfield. He made the first guy miss, slipped past another guy before driving the final defender for an extra couple yards. Runs like that get me so excited for his future.

I think the rushing attack could really benefit from bringing back some read options. When numbers in the box are lopsided, the read option can greatly improve your odds of a successful run. Urban Meyer built his career off of this. I don’t think they need to do this at all before the red zone, but once the field shortens, Ohio State needs to figure out a way to score. If they do not do this, they may have to settle for more field goals. The big issue right now is the health of CJ Stroud, and the protection of his shoulder. I am curious to see how the staff will handle that in the future.

Speaking of CJ Stroud, he was another area of concern. Here is how he performed:

Explanation: Perfect throws, good throws, and scrambles for good gains are all good things. Pressured throws and okay throws are neutral things. Batted balls, throw aways, inaccurate passes, and bad reads are all bad things. The score is a percentage of good things compared to all of the good and bad things combined. For Stroud, this meant that for every bad thing that happened, he did 3 good things. 

I know there isn’t a whole lot of context, but that’s really good. I was not overly impressed with him after Minnesota, but he came to play against Oregon. In particular, that number of perfect throws is highly unusual. I came away from this game thinking that he would be a surefire first round pick someday for a few different reasons.

First though, I want to address some of the bad that I saw. First, the inaccurate throws, while pretty few and far between, all seemed to come at the end of the game when he needed to be at his best. That’s not great. A lot of that was due to the increased pressure, that is true, but he does need to be better. That interception over Olave’s head obviously couldn’t have come at a worse time. The overthrow of Wilson was heartbreaking, even though I am pretty impressed he threw the ball as well as he did since he had to change his arm angle. There was another overthrow of Wilson in the game late as well. He will always be judged by how he performs in those moments, and against Oregon, he wasn’t great there.

The good? Everything else. The number of jaw dropping throws he made was shocking for a guy in his second career start. I don’t remember Haskins ever throwing that many perfect throws. I don’t even think I remember Fields ever being that precise. This might also inadvertently be why he overthrows guys sometimes though. In the second quarter, when he threw his first touchdown pass to Garrett Wilson, he threw an absolute dime right over Wilson’s shoulder. It couldn’t have been thrown any more precisely. Even if a guy was right on his hip, it would have still been a touchdown. The issue? Wilson was wide open. The throw didn’t need to be that good. Fields had a good feel for when he could underthrow the ball a bit, making the catch a little easier on his receivers. Stroud doesn’t seem to have that feeling yet. For a baseball analogy, it is like painting the corners against the opposing pitcher. He isn’t a real threat to hit, so it would make sense to throw strikes closer to the heart of the zone. By trying to paint the corners, you risk balls outside the zone, potentially even walking a guy. Similarly, by trying to be too precise on throws, if you are off just a little bit, you can cause an incompletion, even if the guy is wide open. It makes sense to make the easy throws easy, to put it another way.

He also seems to process things really quickly. There was a play with 7:38 left in the third quarter, where Stroud works left to right and hits Wilson, who is his third read. In that play, he moved through his progressions very quickly, and decisively threw a strike to Wilson. On the potential touchdown pass that was knocked out of Ruckert’s hands, he was also the third read on the play. Stroud hit the checkdown a couple of times too. There is very little panic in the way that he plays, and he makes good decisions. He seems to process things at a very quick pace, which is exciting. I think his ability to process the defense will give Day a lot of flexibility with him moving forward, especially next year.

Also, as good as Justin Fields was, he stayed in the pocket way too long. Stroud has an effective internal clock so he doesn’t take many sacks. He did leave the pocket too early once, and he does need to step up in the pocket sometimes, but I can say that about almost every college quarterback. Stroud also called out a couple of blitzes from the defense. The one that jumped out to me was with 10:10 in the fourth quarter, where he recognized a safety blitzing, called it out to Williams, who made the necessary block. Even though he missed the throw, calling out the blitz was impressive. He did that throughout the game. These are little things, but it shows me Stroud is way more polished than I expected.

Some of my praise for Stroud is just seeing him already doing things better than Fields did. Is he better than Fields right now? Absolutely not. I do think he has the potential to be a better passer though, which is unbelievable because Fields is the best I’ve seen at Ohio State.

So why do many people think Stroud struggled? A couple of reasons. First, as mentioned earlier, it is far easier to remember the big moments in games than the smaller ones. At the end of the game, he was not as sharp as he was earlier. Now, neither was the offensive line, but still, he has to be better in those situations to be free of criticism. Also, some of his best passes of the day were dropped. The two passes to Ruckert and Stover are the ones that probably stick in the minds of people, but the pass to Olave with 4:00 to go in the second quarter is the one that I am reminded of. Olave makes that catch nine times out of ten. And while I think Smith-Njigba’s “drop” on the first drive on fourth down was mostly Stroud’s fault, if he comes down with it, they could very well have scored on that drive. There are so many plays that, if they had gone the other way, Ohio State wins the game, or at least sends it to overtime.  

Finally, while Stroud had good protection for the majority of the game, he did not receive good protection for the last two drives. When the offensive line struggled a little more, he had less time to throw, and less time to find the guy he wanted to throw to.

Stroud isn’t perfect, but he looked way better than I remember on first viewing. He looks like a future star to me.

To wrap it up, quick discussion on the receivers:

There isn’t much to say about them. I saved them for last, but they were flawless. Ohio State has the best wide receivers in the country, and as Stroud gets better, they will get more and more opportunities. I think this offense has a chance to be the best in school history, which is not something I would have said last week. We will see though. The offensive line has to get a lot better, which is not a given. Stroud has to continue improving. While there were good things in this game, he still isn’t the best quarterback in the country, which is the goal at this point for an Ohio State quarterback. If those two things happen, they will be one of the all-time greats.

Alright, that does it for the Oregon game. Doing this was fun. On to Tulsa.