Whether by design or necessity, Ryan Day handed the reins of Ohio State’s offense to Kyle McCord for nearly all of the Buckeyes’ season opener against Indiana Saturday.
Both the jockey and the horse attached to those reins had questionable decisions and stumbles as they traveled down the path of a 23-3 victory over the Hoosiers.
“I thought there were some good things,” Day said of the offense. “But we’ve got to play better situational football. We’ve got to finish in the red zone. We’ve got to finish in short yardage and we’ve got to do a better job on third down.”
While the quarterback competition between McCord and Devin Brown isn’t settled just yet, per Day, the contest gave Ohio State a chance to not just log a full game of tape with McCord as its leader, but give the junior a week of development.
“There were definitely some good plays, some things I want to clean up,” McCord said. “We definitely left some points on the board. We moved the ball pretty well, just a few times in the red zone you want to get touchdowns rather than field goals.”
McCord finished 20-of-33 with 239 yards, no touchdowns and one interception during the evening’s proceedings. The offense gained 380 yards as a whole, 110.7 below its 2022 per-game average, and settled for field goals twice in the red zone with a failed fourth-down conversion inside the Indiana 30-yard line.
Day noted that the plan heading into his team’s opener on the road was to get Brown more looks than the offense was able to.
Indiana stayed within two scores until the final two minutes of the third quarter against Ohio State, however, and that coupled with a rough first series for Brown in the second quarter led Day to ride McCord’s arm until Ohio State’s final offensive possession, when the contest was out of reach.
“I would have liked to see Devin play a little bit more, but we went three-and-out there (on Brown’s first series in the game) and I was worried that we weren’t going to be able to get into a rhythm,” Day said. “We already felt a little clunky early on. Missed on some short-yardage situations, didn’t convert on some third downs.
“I didn’t want to run the risk of putting ourselves in a bad spot by continuing to move those guys in and out. But going in, really wanted to play Devin some more, would like to do that moving forward.”
McCord led the offense down the field for a touchdown on its first possession, completing three of his four passing attempts for 28 yards before Miyan Williams capped the drive with a 7-yard scoring jaunt to put the Buckeyes up 7-0 less than eight minutes into the game.
Ohio State didn’t score another touchdown until there was 1:51 to play in the third quarter.
The scarlet and gray’s second possession went three plays and out, then McCord responded by opening drive three with a 5-for-5, 40-yard passing line that helped take the Buckeyes from their own 21-yard line to the Hoosiers’ 29.
Issues arose on the next throw he made following those five series-opening completions.
On a 4th-and-2 play at the Indiana 29-yard line, McCord faked a handoff and dropped back to look for Chip Trayanum out of the backfield. Trayanum got flattened by an Indiana linebacker, and scrambling to his right, McCord threw the ball back across his body over the middle of the field and into the arms of Indiana defensive back Phillip Dunnam.
“I was just trying to make a play there, but I could be better, smarter with the ball,” McCord said. “You have to have a plan. Obviously that’s not how we drew it up, so you just have to be better and understand that and grow from it.”
That setback prompted the entry of Brown on the following series, but McCord did completed a 24-yard strike to Cade Stover on his next drive back in the game to set up a field goal prior to halftime.
Stover proved McCord’s favorite target as the game wore on, finishing with five catches for 98 yards, a team-high. The longest play of the day for Ohio State came on a 49-yard connection between Stover and McCord deep down the middle of Indiana’s defense in the third quarter.
Julian Fleming, expected to be the Buckeyes’ No. 3 wideout, followed Stover’s production with a team-high six receptions for 58 yards. Ohio State’s two 1,100-yard receivers from 2022, Marvin Harrison Jr. and Emeka Egbuka, recorded five combined catches with neither surpassing 18 yards individually.
“(Marvin) is the best receiver in college football, so it’s going to be rare that you get one-on-one (coverage) with him,” McCord said. “If they do leave him one-on-one, you have to make them pay. But it’s not surprising when they put a safety overtop, whatever the case may be. But I think having him on the field opens up other guys. I think a few times today, we capitalized on that.”
McCord completed what would have been his first touchdown pass of the season to Harrison on the same drive that he found his long gain to Stover, only to have it called back for illegal touching. Ohio State still managed a trip to the end zone, though, when Williams recorded his second score of the day on a 3-yard rush.
“I thought in the third quarter, during those couple of drives, he got into a rhythm, he made some nice throws,” Day said. “He had the nice throw to Marv and the refs told me that he put himself out of bounds – I’d like to see the film. I thought that was a nice throw. But then we came back and scored right after that, which is a good sign because it can be deflating when you throw a touchdown, then you’ve got to come back and do it again.”
McCord went 10-for-16 with 145 yards in the second half, and Day felt he responded well to early-game adversity. He wants to review the tape before giving his full thoughts, however.
“The pick was on fourth down, so it didn’t drop the way we’d like to,” Day said. “I’m not going to blame him for that, if it went back the other way (for a touchdown) it would have been a disaster but we got him on the ground.
“I know he wants to have a couple reads back, a couple things back, but until you really watch the film it’s hard to evaluate exactly how the overall body of work was in the game.”
Something McCord and the offense will need to address moving forward is third-down efficiency. The Buckeyes finished 2-for-12 on third down, with McCord going 2-for-5 for 14 yards and one first down through the air in such situations.
That one first-down completion was a play in which McCord eluded multiple Indiana defenders and delivered a dart to Trayanum for 12 yards on third-and-8.
“Our goal coming in here was to be 1-0, and we are 1-0. But I think there are exciting pieces, we have so much to build and grow on,” McCord said. “We won by 20 points but, offensively speaking, we have a lot more we can improve on. We feel like we left some points on the field and I know I can be better.”
Bigger challenges lie ahead for McCord and the offense, with a Week 4 matchup at Notre Dame just three weeks away. They will hope to walk a smoother path against Youngstown State next week.
