Senior safety Damon Webb (7) takes down a Sooner during the Ohio State- Oklahoma game on Sep. 9. Credit Jack Westerheide | Photo Editor
Ohio State’s 31-16 loss to Oklahoma (2-0) in its home opener left the Buckeyes (1-1, 1-0) wondering where to go.
Neither the offense nor the defense appeared in sync at any point throughout the game, and the result was a crushing defeat in front of 109,088 fans.
Coach Urban Meyer said Monday the team was still reeling from its loss, but the team still has not fully moved on from the loss.
“I met with our players about this, because I experienced it ourselves as coaches and myself, you go from devastated to crushed to pissed and then you’ve got to move forward as a leader and get going,” Meyer said. “So we’re somewhere between two and three right now, the pissed and the moving forward.”
So how does a team move forward after such a devastating loss?
Defensive coordinator and safeties coach Greg Schiano said it’s not easy.
“Look, you come out and you fight and you work because that’s what you do,” Schiano said. “But you won’t get rid of that one for a while. You’ve got to press through it and fight. It sits in your gut.”
The players and coaches all seem to agree that the first step in moving past the loss is by shifting all focus from went wrong in the Oklahoma game to what has to go right in the Army game. The Buckeyes will face a team that is nearly the complete opposite of their prior opponent.
Oklahoma currently ranks third in passing offense in the FBS, averaging 441 passing yards per game over its first two games of the season.
Army, on the other hand, has averaged 417.5 rush yards per game, second in the FBS. The Black Knights also rank 129th out of 129 teams totalling just 17 passing yards in their two games played. Ohio State, on the other hand, ranks last in the country in passing yards allowed (403 per game) and 13th-best in rushing yards allowed (60.5 per game)
“It’s such a different animal moving forward that we’ll deal more with regular football corrections a week from now on Sunday when we get done with the Army game, then we’ll get back to playing regular football,” Schiano said. “It’s not like anything else we see all year.”
The team knows the differences in the opponent it plays this weekend, and so any reviews of Ohio State’s performance against Oklahoma in the tapes is going to have to wait until after the matchup against Army.
Redshirt senior linebacker Chris Worley said the team has begun to look over some of the bigger plays in the Oklahoma game, but that the team has attempted its best to turn its full attention to the task ahead of it.
“Dealing with a team like Army that runs this type of offense, we can’t spend the whole week watching [tape of the Oklahoma game] because then we will never get what we need to see for this week,” Worley said. “That’s some great film for us to watch. We have to go out here and watch this Army film because if we don’t, it’s going to be bad.”
