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The Ohio State Autopsy | Part 2 of 3
Many Questions After Desert Debacle
By Paul Smith
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Michigan City, Ind. — Michigan City, Ind. -- The shock wave that hit Columbus around 11 p.m. Monday, Jan. 8 brought with it a death-in-the-family atmosphere.
Such is the city -- and state -- mood swing with the ups and downs of their beloved Ohio State Buckeyes.
The High Street bars -- Eddie George's, the Four Kegs, countless others -- were a study in somber consolation, with muted voices uttering a thousand questions.
What went wrong? Two parter -- why?
How could it fall so completely apart?
Why didn't head coach Jim Tressel, or his top assistants -- offensive coordinator Jim Bollman or defensive specialist Jim Heacock -- come up with the type of adjustments they almost always have in Tressel's six seasons in Columbus?
Three Jims, no answers. Not a scoreline many Buckeyes fans wanted to hear. Florida 41, Ohio State 14 was enough, already.
How could Florida's down linemen beat one of the country's best offensive lines off the ball so regularly?
How was the Buckeyes' secondary so utterly out-of-position for Florida's sophisticated, but at the same time, brutally statement-oriented crossing patterns that created first down after first down?
How could even busted Florida running plays wind up gaining 3-4 yards?
How could the Buckeyes pick up back-to-back personal foul penalities -- both justly called -- during Florida kick returns, that set up the Gators' first two touchdown drives on the Ohio State side of the 50, first at the 46, then, on a punt return, at the 30.
The 51-day layoff?
Conditioning? Fat and content?
Media annointment as one of the great teams ever?
Florida's ferocity vs. the Buckeyes' banality?
Oh-and-8 versus Southeastern Conference teams in bowl games -- losing by over 14 points per game?
A U.S. TaxCode manualful of questions.
A Form 1040A worth of answers.
It is nearly two weeks and the answers have been slow in coming. Perhaps, the inner sanctum at St. John Arena is still doing its mental bodycount. The silence on Woody Hayes Drive was beyond deafening.
Until this past Wednesday.
In a story filed by The Columbus Dispatch's Tim May, we finally get some answers supplied by Tressel to the Buckeyes' flagship station, WBNS/1460, 'The Fan."
Talking with co-hosts Kirk Herbstreit, of ESPN pre-game fame, and former Cleveland Plain Dealer O.S.U. beat man Bruce Hooley, Tressel finally offered some insights.
One key was Florida's mental edge, which may have played a much larger role than the celebrated Gators' speed advantage which thousands of media from Florida to Flint saw with their naked eyes.
"I think the fine line and the edge in games is always the mental part," Tressel said Wednesday.
"I'm not so sure -- and, again, that's why you start with yourself -- if we had our team as mentally prepared as we could have had it."
Mark it down. Thousands of "Fan" listeners, as much as they love the Tressel era and all the red vested former Baldwin-Wallace quarterback and football lifer stands for, may have spilled their morning coffees while shouting a collective, "Well, DUUUUUHHHH!!!"
But for sure, Tressel wasn't buying into the S.E.C. superiority theory.
"Wisconsin went down and did the things you have to do (to beat S.E.C. championship game runner-up Arkansas)," Tressel pointed out. "They won the turnover margin and they won the kicking game, and they beat the second-place team in the S.E.C. (in the Capital One Bowl)."
And of course, Penn State beat Tennessee, setting Ohio State up for what would have been a sweet 3-0 Big Ten sweep of their S.E.C. bowl opponents.
Instead, it left wide open the question most Buckeyes faithful wanted answered: Game readiness.
Tressel's answer here was less than reassuring. "(he didn't know) ... for sure if a team was 'ready to play,'" he said to Hooley and Herbstreit, who was a Buckeyes quarterback from 1990-92.
"You hope that the preperation leading up has made it such. Inevitably, what goes on early in a football game might tilt that one way or the other."
No argument here. The Buckeyes' mental preparedness deficiency centered around poor kickoff coverage, both on the Gators' response to Ted Ginn, Jr.'s game-opening 93-yard touchdown kickoff return. Tackling was sloppy and indecisive and when kicker Aaron Pettrey, a bright lad, got caught for a face-mask violation, the Gators, already with good field position, wound up starting their first drive at Ohio State's 46.
The second, against a solid special teamer in Larry Grant, was a similar product of failure to execute fundamentals and Florida started from the O.S.U. 30.
The "Tilt" light threatened to go off at this point.
Before long, it became 21-7 and Antonio Pittman's 18-yard T.D. run that climaxed the Bucks' only meaningful drive -- a 64-yarder in the middle of the second quarter -- was little more than a temporary respite.
Repeated mental and physical errors led to 13 unanswered Florida points -- two field goals and a touchdown after Troy Smith was hit by two Gators inside the 10 to set up a first-and-goal for U.F., which took a 34-14 halftime lead.
Tilt. This time for good. The Buckeyes only possessed the football for 19 of the 60 minutes.
"We weren't exerting the kind of pressure you need to take control of a game," Tressel added. "So I guess the answer to the question is I could kind of see (the tilt) on that kickoff and then on that punt.
Inevitably the subject of Tressel's failed gamble on a fourth-and-1 inside the O.S.U. 30 that set up the second of Florida's field goals came up.
Power back Chris "Beanie" Wells, a running back with two of the most powerful legs since Bob Ferguson and Jim Otis wore the Scarlet and Gray in the late 1960s, was stuffed by two scraping Florida linebackers, who worked behind a persistent defensive line that shut down the Buckeyes running game all night.
"I felt at that point in time we needed to step up and make a yard when a yard was needed if we were going to ultimately be the ones who got to put the big ring on this time," Tressel said. "We didn't get that done...You have to make decisions.
"Some are right ones, some end up being the wrong ones. But ultimately you have to look and say why was it or wasn't it the right decision, and go from there."
Tressel called it a "long, long time" he expects the aftertaste of Florida 41, Ohio State 14 to last in Buckeye Nation.
He surely got that right.
Coming in Part III: Analysis without paralysis: A look at Ohio State's post-bowl status.
Paul Smith covers the Big Ten, Notre Dame and the rest of the national college football scene with his View From the Midwest.
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