This Week in Ohio State Football: To run, or not to run? That is not exactly the question

The Buckeyes aren’t very good at running the ball, though it is not for lack of trying.

Ryan Day said lack of trying won’t be why they can’t run it the rest of the season, either, so this discussion probably isn’t close to over.

Let’s dissect this situation…

1. Most notably, the head coach of the Buckeyes ruled out giving up on trying to get the ground game going.

Day said he has done that before and learned his lesson.

A reporter asked if that might have come when the Buckeyes last played at Purdue, a 49-20 upset in 2018 that saw Dwayne Haskins Jr. throw 73 times for 470 yards while Ohio State ran 25 times for 76 yards.

Day said there was not just one game, but that was a good example.

“Throwing for 450 yards in a game is great, but it’s gonna catch up with you later in the season if you can’t figure out how to run the ball,” Day said. “And I’ve learned my lesson on that so we’re just going to keep pushing as hard as we can to make sure that we have the balance we need to win the games we need.”

The running game was a year-long issue in 2018, Day’s second as offensive coordinator (along with Kevin Wilson) under Urban Meyer, but I look more to 2021…

2. Day has been trying to right the wrongs of the latter part of 2021, particularly the Michigan game, since the start of last season.

That’s pretty obvious, right?

Michigan outrushed Ohio State 297-64 on a snowy afternoon in Ann Arbor almost two years ago and snapped an eight-game Ohio State winning streak in the series.

While Michigan fans danced on the field to some terrible emo song, head coach Jim Harbaugh said some people (he meant Day) woke up on third base and think they hit a triple.

Not long after, Michigan’s then-offensive coordinator said Ohio State was a good team but a finesse team.

Harbaugh’s barb might have been unfair, but the latter was fairly easy to confirm with the eye test, and I’m sure they both justifiably stung Day.

My personal theory at that time and still today is that Day didn’t feel like he could trust the running game against Michigan that day because he didn’t try to utilize it enough in the previous weeks. He left himself too few options when the rubber met the road in the biggest game of the season, and everything changed in the rivalry from that point on.

3. I get the catch-22 they are in now, of course

The Buckeyes might also get good weather in Ann Arbor this Nov. 25 and be able to throw it as much as they want, but then again, the weather was good last season, and the Buckeyes still came out on the short end of the stick.

A team has to be able to throw the ball well to win it all at the highest levels of football, but having a reliable running game makes that easier, especially if you don’t have Joe Burrow or for that matter C.J. Stroud.

Where this gets tricky is the Buckeyes still have teams regularly defending them as if they are good at running the ball. That’s a great opportunity to prove yourself as a running team, unless you fall short. Then it becomes a double-whammy.

“I think it all goes together,” Day said. “I think at the end of the day, you have to move the ball, that’s the bottom line, but there’s going to be games here coming up that it’s gonna be raining, it’s gonna be windy, and you’re not going to have an opportunity to just line up in four and five wides and throw it all over the yard.”

4. OK, so we get the “Why?” What about the “how”?

The running scheme got kinda stale in the latter years of the Meyer era. He liked to run inside zone, and his version is more physical than some because it calls for aggressive double teams at the point of attack with an emphasis on getting up field. (Once teams committed to taking that away, Meyer was slow to react other than to have the quarterback run more, which had its own pros and cons.)

Day and Wilson made outsize zone, which is more popular in the NFL, their staple run after Meyer retired. That asks for the linemen to step to the play side and block who they can find while the running back goes off tackle looking for a place to dart through the line.

Outsize zone was very successful with shifty veteran J.K. Dobbins and a physically talented offensive line in 2019, but not so much since.

Day said the staff is constant conversions about the scheme, and they have tried a greater variety of things, especially since bringing in new offensive line coach Justin Frye last season.

I haven’t tracked every run of the season, but one certainly gets the impression Ohio State has had more blowups with outsize zone and more success with “gap” plays. Those call for the linemen on the front size to block down with the backside linemen pulling to lead the running back. This was the scheme popularized by Joe Gibbs’ Washington Redskins teams in the 1980s, and it happens to be Michigan’s main way of moving the ball. (Jim Tressel’s favorite play, which is generally called “Power,” is from this family of runs as well.)

“You can imagine it was brought up again this week,” Day said. “Schematically, you’re trying to figure out what your guys can do well and then does it fit your backs? Does it fit your line? Does it fit your quarterback? You know trying to find the right angles and the one thing about the stretch play is it gets people out in space. You know it’s not just a bunch of guys in a small area.”

5. “At the end of the day, you have to move the ball. That’s the bottom line…”

But how?

Maryland was a bend-but-don’t break style defense while starting 5-0, but the Terrapins seemed more interested in stopping the run at Ohio State.

Kyle McCord and Marvin Harrison Jr. feasted in the passing game as a result, which actually means the running game did its ultimate job even if it did not account for many yards.

That’s today’s football. Generate big plays any way necessary, often through the passing game with an assist from the run.

I expect Purdue is likely to also defend the line of scrimmage first and see what happens. That might not work, but they probably aren’t going to win anyway so it’s better to cause chaos and hope for the best than to die by 1,000 cuts.

But Ohio State wants to run the ball anyway as much for peace of mind as anything else.

So will they?

“So the other thing is this year, when you’re playing you have a good defense of a young quarterback so you’re maybe less likely to take as many chances early on,” Day said. “But then there comes a time where you can’t beat your head against the wall, either. So finding that rhythm is what’s important because the No. 1 goal was to win games, but we gotta keep building. We gotta keep getting better. We’ve got to keep pushing the envelope in all areas because we want to have that balance, and we know that we’re going to need both sides of the offense, both running and passing.”