Jim Knowles knows that he's short on time.
At least, I'm pretty sure he does.
“It’s not lost on me that I don’t have four years here. This program is ready to win every single game right now, and we have to get the defense to that level.”
That's a great quote (and catnip to an Ohio State fanbase that expects excellence right now), but I was thinking about how we might nail down exactly how long "right now" actually is. Knowles also talked about how in Stillwater he had four seasons to right the ship, but the chasm between "four seasons" and "immediately" is vast.
To figure this out, I went back and looked at some of the recent Ohio State defensive coaching turnover in relation to how well the team performed on defense overall. For instance, in 2018 the Buckeye defense was co-authored by Greg Schiano and Alex Grinch, and that edition of the Silver Bullets finished the year ranking 71st nationally in total defense (giving up over 400 yards per game).
You might remember 2018 as the season in which Purdue dropped 49 points on Ohio State in an upset in West Lafayette, and the Buckeyes barely escaped Maryland in overtime, 52-51. You might also remember that season in which Ohio State won the Big Ten Championship, again, and a Rose Bowl, again, but maybe that's the point: despite an otherwise pretty remarkable year, Schiano and Grinch hit the bricks after just two and one seasons in their positions, respectfully. The defense was bad and they had to go.
There is, of course, some additional context here. Ryan Day becoming head coach and restructuring the coaching staff can't be ignored, but that too plays into the equation with the hiring of Jeff Hafley and, maybe more interestingly, Greg Mattison.
We weren't surprised when Hafley and Mattison were successful at Ohio State (the Buckeyes ended up having statistically the best defense in the country in their first year as co-defensive coordinators), and I don't think most people were surprised when Hafley left to pursue a head coaching gig at Boston College. But that happening did a few things: it gave context to anything that happened defensively after 2019, and alongside that threw Mattison's future performance into sharp relief.
Thus far, the unsaid point in this article is that ultimately how we judge any coordinator is heavily dependent on how long they stay. Had Mattison retired when Hafley left, there's a good chance he'd be seen in the same light as the latter was. Instead, Mattison stayed on, Ohio State's defense regressed (now with Kerry Coombs as co-coordinator), and he was viewed as dead weight. Mattison retires, Coombs rides solo, the defense doesn't improve in 2021, and Coombs bears the brunt of the criticism.
All of this is fine, and part of the job, but let's return to Jim Knowles.
Knowles has no cover. He's being paid 1.9 million dollars to be the lone architect of a rebuild job for Ohio State (and, ostensibly, to manage linebackers). Ryan Day has described Knowles' position as "head coach of the defense," and with that carries a level of responsibility that some recent defensive coordinators have been able to blunt by virtue of sharing the spotlight. Coombs had it all to himself in 2021, and it took exactly one season of that for him to be sent packing.
By my math, all of this adds up to Knowles being given maybe a season and a half to produce results.
Whether Hafley deserves the full credit or not, the impression is that he alone was able to turn around Ohio State's fortunes in just one season. Knowles will be held to that expectation, and if by the end of year two Buckeye linebackers are missing assignments and the secondary is getting burned by backup quarterbacks in the 4th quarter of close games, his seat (and maybe even Ryan Day's seat) might start to get hot. He doesn't need to turn Ohio State's defense into the best in the country, but it needs to improve. Quickly.
The second unsaid point in this article is that I wonder if the same holds true for our friends up north. There's been an enormous amount of staff upheaval in just the last few weeks, and I'm curious to see what might happen if new offensive and defensive coordinators can't deliver in 2022 the same kind of results the Wolverines had in 2021.
That's the problem with having standards; once set, responsibility is shared by the people who expect them to be met. Partly by the person who has to live up to them, and partly by the person who has to decide what that means.
