It’s no secret that Ohio State’s offensive line didn’t play to expectations Saturday.
The Buckeyes averaged 4.6 yards per carry – almost a full yard below their mark of 5.4 a season ago – and quarterback Kyle McCord came under pressure in the pocket on a number of his dropbacks.
“I felt like they needed to play better,” Ryan Day said at his weekly press conference Tuesday. “In the run game, I think we were only 50 percent efficient overall on first- and second-downs running the ball. That’s not good enough. They certainly did give us some things that we weren’t expecting, but even when they did, I don’t think we handled it as well as we could have. So we’ll be getting back to work this week.”
Josh Fryar, the team’s starting right tackle, was the only member of the front five who graded out as a champion against Indiana.
If Ohio State is to achieve its goals, it will need to make improvements up front, Day acknowledged. With only two games separating the Buckeyes from their first big showdown of the season against Notre Dame, there is urgency to take those next steps.
“We’ve got to establish the run here,” Day said. “We’ve got to get downhill, we’ve got to move people and we’ve got to be physical. We can’t be relying on the pass all the time, it’s just not the way we’re going to be here. So at some point we’ve got to get up there, draw a line in the sand and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got to move people.’”
One of the primary areas of struggle for Ohio State’s offensive line – and offense as a whole – came on third downs against Indiana.
The Buckeyes went 2-for-12 on third-down conversions, and elected to pass on all three of their fourth-down attempts – including two 4th-and-2 situations in the first half. That directly stemmed from a lack of confidence in the ground game, per Day.
“If you can get to 4th-and-1, you can run it again,” Day said. “But if you run it on 3rd-and-2, you get zero both times, now it’s 4th-and-2, you don’t have a lot of confidence that you’re going to get two yards (on the ground).”
As far as the new starters on the offensive line are concerned, Day still feels encouraged by what he’s seeing, even if there’s a lot of development that still needs to happen.
New center Carson Hinzman, the youngest of the bunch as a redshirt freshman, didn’t botch any snaps and showed some solid play in Week 1 even if he didn’t light up the game tape.
“I was encouraged overall,” Day said. “He did not grade out a champion, but for the first road game at center with everything going on, I thought he called a decent game. There were a couple things that were a little funky in there. But overall he was OK.”
New left tackle Josh Simmons hit plenty of rough patches against the Hoosiers, but Day believes he still has the tools to excel.
“Again, the word is consistency,” Day said. “He did some good things. You can see it, you can see the athleticism but just not consistent enough for what we need.”
Overall, Day thinks the Buckeyes’ offensive line can get to where they need to be if they make the proper corrections.
“I don’t see anything on the film that isn’t correctable, like guys just getting flat-out beat or not (being) good enough,” Day said. “That is the most encouraging thing. I think they are things that can get corrected. Would have loved to see better execution but the things that we’ve seen there are all correctable.”
