COLUMBUS, Ohio — So, what exactly did Ohio State do for two weeks?
It had two weeks to figure out what was wrong with its team after its first loss, and instead it looked like all it did was sulk about someone who should’ve been non-consequential.
The good news, the defense looked better. But you can’t decipher how much of that was an overcorrection after spending two weeks hearing how bad they were against Oregon, mixed with Nebraska playing a freshman quarterback. Even that was far from perfect. Caleb Downs’ play helped hide some things that would’ve been much worse had he not been on this roster.
He was the best thing about the Buckeyes against Nebraska while the rest looked even uglier than the last time this team played a game. Saturday was shades of the last time they played the Cornhuskers two weeks after losing to a western Big Ten team, then going into an off week. That was back in 2018, when, again, the defense was a problem and Nebraska came to Columbus with a freshman quarterback.
Back then it was Adrian Martinez, an underrated recruit who used that game to make a name for himself. Today it was Dylan Raiola, the five-star once expected to be part of OSU’s future, showing Columbus what it missed out on.
Ohio State lost to Oregon two weeks ago. It was a tough loss but meant very little to the big picture because nothing had to change. Everything it wanted to accomplish was still on the table.
That is no longer the case and that would’ve been true regardless of the outcome on the actual scoreboard.
Now the Buckeyes have lost the benefit of the doubt. They’ve lost their standing of being clearly head and shoulders above the rest of the sport, outside of a few chosen few. This team hasn’t proven its championship caliber and it’s running out of time to do so.
You had two weeks to fix your problems. Two weeks to figure out how to start rebuilding your offensive line after losing the unit’s best player. Two weeks to spend the necessary time licking your wounds then quickly getting back to work, making sure you used a game against an outmatched opponent to make a necessary statement.
Instead, this fan base got a pathetic performance at home while creating more things to worry about than it had, even after a one-point road loss to the team currently sitting at the top of The Associated Press Top 25 Poll.
Instead, we saw them experiment at spots that didn’t need to be experimented with, like choosing to rotate Brandon Inniss and Caleb Downs at punt returner even though Downs is your best safety, and value is all that more important since Lathan Ransom is out with an injury and you clearly don’t have much confidence in anything behind them right now.
We saw that Ransom’s injury has you scrambling to figure out options, which meant rotating numerous players to see what works and what doesn’t. That’s not a world you should be living in seven games into a season.
Plus you lost your starting left tackle … again. So now you’ve lost Josh Simmons for the year and his backup, Zen Michalski, forcing you to move left guard Donovan Jackson out to left tackle and put a second-year player, Luke Montgomery, who’d been repping at center, in at left guard.
Nothing got fixed and the things that were already good somehow got worse. And the only reason the Buckeyes didn’t have to pay for it was because the talent gap between them and the opponent was so wide that they escaped with a narrow win, where it took a game-saving interception from Jordan Hancock to secure a 21-17 victory.
But the holes have been poked and Oregon might not be the only team on Ohio State’s schedule that can make it pay for not fixing its problems. Even though you had two weeks.