Buckeye Outpost

Well, what an off season this has been! The scandal which rocked OSU is almost in the rear view mirror. Lost is our Hall of Fame Coach and now many questions need answers. I think for all of us, Saturday's game was a welcome relief. Now football is back and a new era has begun!
That said, there was some good and bad in Saturday's victory. Unfortunately for us, the worse case scenario has occurred on offense. Jim Bollman appears to be calling the offensive plays. The same knucklehead that has been responsible for our underachieving offense lines during the Tressel era is till here! We thought that Tress was conservative in his play calling. This guy makes Tress looks very aggressive. Numerous times during the game both Urban Meyer and Chris Spielman would say "This is the time to take a shot downfield". Each and everytime they would say this, Bollman would run it up the middle. I know he was trying to establish a run game, but none of our backs even reached 100 yards. This is against probably the worse team in all of Division I last year. None of our backs appeared to be able to break a large gainer. Let me be the first to say, we will go nowhere on offense with Bollman at the helm.
The other disappointing aspect of the offense on Saturday was the lack of speed at wide receiver. Until we get Posey back, we are going to be in trouble at receiver for these remaining 4 games. I think Miami will be able to show us how lacking we are on speed.
The QB situation appears to me to be a juxtaposition of where Fickle is wrt to his coaching situation. He has to win and win big this year to save his job. He can't afford a subpar rebuilding season. This is the only reason I think Bauserman is even in the picture at QB. He appears to herky jerky to me at the QB position. It looks forced and I think it's gonna kill us early. We need to go with the very bright future of Braxton Miller. He impresses me with his poise, quickness and canon of an arm. we need to invest in the future of the program, for the good of the program.
Stoneburner appears to be the lynchpin on offense. Hopefully, we will continue to ride this horse much like wisconsin did I few years back. He will open things up for the rest of the offense.
I did see something in Roddy Smith at RB. He reminds me of a trimmed down Eddie George. He even fumbled within the 5 yard line like George did when he was a Freshman.

The defense looks quite impressive to me. I love how Fickle is putting his stamp on the team by calling the defensive plays. (I just wish he had a competent offensive coordinator to counter him!) I saw aggression in the defense which seemed to be lacking last year. My only real worry is whether our secondary can cover dominant receivers when all this blitzing is occuring.
I was worried whether Fickle would try and be more like Tressel and not have his own stamp on the team. I don't have that worry yet. He does appear to have his own style. I just wish he would get a new offensive coordinator!

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I honestly thought total annihilation was in store for us last week and was very surprised by how close the game was.  That said, we had ample opportunity to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and were unable to capitalize on them!  Originally, I wanted to cite both Pryor and Tressel as the main culprits in this loss, and now believe it was a team loss.

No matter how much you hate Tress' conservative ball control and field position chess match, it's the pill we will have to swallow as long as he is our coach.  We can second guess him all we want, but the bottom line is that the offense didn't execute as he intended.  Ohio State football has been about 3 yards and a cloud of dust for as long as I can remember.  When we failed to even get a 4th and 2 against Navy a few weeks ago that should have been a sign that we have major issues again with the running game.  All the juggling of O'line is an indication that we really don't have strong O'linemen  and we have to make do with what we have.  In all honesty, the O'line (revamped or not) isn't any better than what we've been forced to swallow the last 3 years.  In neither of these games did we create holes for our RB's or move opposing D'lines.  Bollman has to take a lot of the blame for this and really needs to go, but again our players are not executing either.  Something desperately needs to change here or we will never get back to our winning ways.  The only Tressel call I don't get, is why we don't use Pryor on a 4th and short situation, he's 6'6" and weighs 260 lbs, he should be able to get us a short yardage situation easily.

Pryor looked to me like he was thinking way too much.  His hesitation to act really cost us the game.  Last year I was complaining about him looking to run first before checking down and this year it's just the opposite.  If he has improved in the passing game, it hasn't shown because his decision making is horrible at this stage.  This is the second week in a row that Pryor has been outplayed by the opposing teams supposedly inferior QB.  Oh and don't be fooled by UM's Forcier, he didn't play a real defense yet and I expect him to look worse in the near future. I also feel Pryor doesn't forget his mistakes, he dwells on them during the game and it effects the rest of his play.  He is unfortunately a work in progress.

The defense was the biggest surprise of the night.  The line held up for most of the game and really gave it to the vaunted USC O'line.  The corner coverage was outstanding and LB play was decent.  Yet again, though, we found someway to give up 2 big drives at the end of each half.   This is a disturbing trend which has continued in every big game.  In the Tressel ball control system, the defense has to be able to make stops when it counts.  That is critical to the success of the system.  Somehow, the defense can't put an end to the game when we really need to do it.  The defense is as much to blame for the loss as the offense. 

Tressel ain't going anywhere and his system will work against a lot of teams.  He plays not to lose.  He plays the percentages and tries not to take risks.  This only works when the team executes his plays that he calls and minimizes mistakes.  When we play a team like USC with offensive firepower and the "play to win" attitude it will give his system some fits.  Pryor's poor decision making, the lack of any offensive line push and a "let us down" when it counts defense has created this problem for us.  The problem really is that we've been talking about the same issues for the most part the last 5 years and it hasn't changed.

Toledo will give us fits on offense this week, but their defense is horrid.   Now is a good time to change our losing ways.  Pryor gets some exciting plays on offense, the line actually creates a big hole that a mack truck could drive through and the defense makes a stop when it counts against a potent offense.  That would be the makings of the perfect storm for the buckeyes.  Hopefully, we'll see it for a change.

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Tags: Announcements by swjessen
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As a surprise treat last weekend, I took my family to Yogurtville.  You get to fix your own frozen yogurt with toppings all at a set price per ounce.  It was great, my kids had a field day.   After sampling all the flavors of yogurt, I went with my mainstay, vanilla.  I added minimal amounts of toppings, cause I like the vanilla yogurt.  My oldest daughter on the other hand, went the chocolate route and proceeded to put just about every topping possible. 

I like vanilla as my yogurt flavor, not my football teams offensive scheme!  The play calling was so predictable, even the announcers were telling you what OSU was going to do on each play.  This appears to be the sad trend in OSU offense and we really have no one to blame except Tressel.  Oh yeah, we finally threw it to the tight ends (which made me drop my drink since I haven't seen that since Cooper days) and we had an option pitch to the running backs and some run to the first down markers and stop passes, and it was all so predictable.  The O line was supposed to be revamped, but the Navy undersized Dline was pushing them around.  We should have been able to run the ball all day and we looked really bad up the middle.  If this is what we should expect the rest of the year (and based on past experience it is), we won't be in the top 25 by the end of the season.  I hate to say it, but Tressel's downfall may be his uncompromising loyalty to his staff.  Bollman has proven time and time again that he isn't a decent Oline coach or asst coach to boot.  If Tressel keeps this up, he'll be coaching somewhere else next year. We desperately need to add some toppings to this vanilla or they'll be some serious beat downs on us this year.

As alluded to earlier this year (see spring ball posting), our Dbacks couldn't cover anyone.  We are in for a lot of trouble the rest of the year if this is the case.  Again our Dline couldn't move the Navy Oline (with the exception of Gibson who looks like a beast).  The linebackers were average at best in this game as well.   In a nutshell, our defense is in rebuilding mode (not reloading). 

Finally, Terrelle Pryor didn't impress me as being much better than he was at the end of last year.  He was flat out outplayed by the Navy QB who had less to work with then Pryor did.  The only noticeable improvement was that he looked to pass first then run. 

This upcoming week will define our season and I'mafraid we are up for an historic home loss, the worse in OSU history.  I can just see Pete Carrolls prep for the week, it'll go something like this:

"On offense, we need to double team Gibson.  Uhh.. that should do it."

"On defense, we need to place a middle linebacker as spy on Pryor.  Oh and on third and long we'll need to double team Sanzenbacher."

Folks, it'll be that simple for USC.  You look at every category and they have someone in the top 5 except for QB.  USC doesn't need Barkley to do a thing cause they'll be able to run it down our throat the whole game.   Their whole Oline is back and so is our Dline and we know what happened last year!  To boot, we don't have the same LB's as last year or even a decent DB.  This is going to be ugly.

On offense, this game will define Pryor's entire college career.  The pressure is solely on him to perform for this game as he really is the only guy on the field (maybe Gibson) who can play with these guys.  Based upon past performances, I don't think he'll be able to deliver.  We have an unproven receiving corp (who apparently couldn't get open deep against Navy, cause I don't recall any long passes) and our backs seemed ineffective in running the ball.  This is going to be ugly.

There is still a very tiny part of me that believes Tressel was holding back the true offense and it would be chocolate frozen yogurt with all the fixings just busting with pizazz.  Unfortunately I've been burned on this too many times and know I have to eat the vanilla frozen yogurt and like it...

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Tags: Announcements by swjessen
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