Jim Knowles’ defense will finally be unveiled for the first time at Ohio Stadium Saturday as the Buckeyes partake in their annual spring game. Actually, that may only be true in part.
Knowles will be calling the defense as his unit goes up against Ryan Day’s offense in the exhibition contest, but the Buckeye head coach said Thursday that Ohio State’s first-year defensive coordinator won’t exactly be revealing all his tricks in the intrasquad scrimmage four-and-a-half months before the 2022 season starts.
In fact, Day made it sound as though Knowles won’t be showing very much at all outside of the Buckeyes’ base look.
“He’s not going to do a whole lot of his stuff in this game. It’s gonna be about fundamentals and running around to the football and playing hard,” Day said at his final press conference prior to the spring game. “We’ve seen throughout these first 13 practices just the multiple looks, the confidence and how well these guys play and just how decisive they are out there – I think that’s been done. Now, we’ll get an opportunity to go play in the Shoe and in front of a big crowd. It’ll be very, very basic, but it’s good for our guys to get in front of the crowd and play, have some fun and see some of the best players in the country.”
Despite the excitement from fans to see the changes to a defense that let the Buckeyes down on more than one occasion under Kerry Coombs and company last season, Knowles could hardly have been expected to show everything that’s under the hood this early on.
But the talk out of camp in recent weeks, and particularly from the Buckeye quarterbacks, has been that the complex nature of Knowles’ multi-look defense has caused confusion for both the offensive players and coaches alike during spring practices.
“They do a lot of different things,” C.J. Stroud said after practice on April 6. “They have different ways to get to different coverages, which is really good for my eyes to see. Not just seeing Cover 1, Cover 3 or just base coverage every day. I really appreciate Coach Knowles bringing that swagger to the defense, it's really going to help our offense.”
Knowles’ defense can be so complicated that the defenders themselves have been overloaded by the new information at times, with Oklahoma State transfer safety Tanner McCalister admitting last week that he approached his longtime coach about the amount of new plays he was implementing in a short timeframe early on in the spring.
But McCalister said the Buckeye defense has absorbed and processed that knowledge quickly as the spring has rolled along, and Day echoed those sentiments in praise of the group on Thursday.
“I think with our players, one thing that Jim would probably tell you is that Jim has been impressed with how professional they’ve been in terms of their preparation, being able to handle high levels of information,” Day said. “Because of that, you’re able to put a bunch of cut-ups together for the next couple months to watch on film, and that’s the idea.
“You gotta get fundamentally better, but when you’re installing an offense or a defense, you want to try to get some of that stuff on film so you can teach off of the film over the next few months as you head into August. And so I think they’ve done that, I think they’ve put a bunch of that on film and I think we’ve all been impressed with how much they’ve been able to handle – the volume – while still playing with really good fundamentals.”
Crucial to the fundamentals Day mentioned is the defense’s ability to tackle, which seems to be of higher priority than teasing the complexities of Knowles’ scheme in this year’s spring game. After the first few series of Saturday’s scrimmage, the Buckeyes will go live and tackle to the ground, which has not been seen in an Ohio State spring game since Urban Meyer’s final season as head coach in 2018.
The shift in mindset defensively, as well as Ohio State’s Week 1 opponent, both have something to do with that decision.
“I just think we need to play the game this year, we gotta go out there and tackle and play. I think it’ll be good for a lot of our guys to do that,” Day said. “The first game of the year we play Notre Dame at home, and we gotta be ready to roll. Once you get into the preseason, you start getting closer and closer to that first game, you start to really hold your breath because you don't want to lose guys. But we also gotta tackle, we gotta play physical, we gotta be tough. If we want to reach our goals this year, we’re gonna have to be that way, we’re gonna have to play that way. So we’ll do that on Saturday.”
Knowles said at the beginning of the spring that “you don’t have to practice bringing guys to the ground,” and that “we’re trying to save bodies” by avoiding full contact as much as possible. But Day said he “talked it out” with Knowles and his defensive coordinator is “definitely on board” with the decision to tackle in Saturday’s spring game.
Expect to see contact on the gridiron this weekend – outside of the quarterbacks, of course – but don’t expect to necessarily be flabbergasted by the new wrinkles of Knowles’ defense. Those will likely take time to reveal, as Ohio State plans to hold some of its cards close to the vest before diving head first into top-flight competition at the start of the season this September.
