Ryan Day addresses key area where Ohio State is failing to win situational football
With all of the recent focus on the Ohio State offensive line failing to create run lanes and the defense not living up to certain expectations, the most concerning trend this team has relates to situational football. On Tuesday, Ohio State head coach Ryan Day talked about the team's struggles on early downs and how […]
With all of the recent focus on the Ohio State offensive line failing to create run lanes and the defense not living up to certain expectations, the most concerning trend this team has relates to situational football. On Tuesday, Ohio State head coach Ryan Day talked about the team's struggles on early downs and how that affects their third-down conversion rate.
Undoubtedly, the team's plummeting run success has led to longer third down attempts against higher-quality foes. Fixing one likely improves the other. However, it's not a good sign that the Buckeyes have converted only 1-of-10 third downs against Nebraska and have dipped to a 36.3 conversion rate over the last three games.
Day, in his weekly press conference, is focusing heavily on addressing this emerging weakness. "We can talk until we're blue in the face about running and passing, but if you don't execute, you won't have balance," Day said.
Looking closer at the box scores of the last two games against Oregon and Nebraska show interesting results. Here is the distance of each third-down attempt over these two games.
- 7
- 10
- 11
- 16
- 9
- 1
- 1
- 3
- 4
- 7
- 13
- 6
- 20
- 10
- 9
- 1
- 6
- 3
- 2
- 1
- 5
- 9
Considering that only six of the last 22 third downs have been 10 or more yards and that eight have been within four yards, the Buckeyes should be performing much better than they have been. These are often not completely unreasonable situations to convert.
It's not as if Ohio State is so far behind the chains on third downs they'd need to run four verts and hope for a coverage bust. A healthy run game could manage or gain almost half of these third downs. The rest could be attacked with quicker passing concepts that aren't just swing passes to the flat.
It's good that Day is aware of this becoming such an eyesore of a unit on the most critical down of each drive. Failing to become more proficient will cost the Buckeyes another win. It could be this week or at an even costlier time later in the year.
