Ohio State head football coach Urban Meyer spoke for a bit on Tuesday’s Big Ten coaches teleconference. He answered questions about his team and also took a look forward to Saturday’s trip to Iowa City. Here are the highlights.
+ How has J.T. Barrett responded to criticism? “He’s an old veteran” who has responded as you would expect. Barrett has seen it all and has had slip ups and great moments. He could write a book. There was never any internal issues or doubts with Barrett. As to Barrett’s struggles early in the season, Meyer put it on everybody. The team didn’t play well and sometimes things happen in college football.
+ Meyer will watch the reaction his team has following a big win and make sure they are focused on the task ahead. “They’re very professional” but he will watch the team closely, especially the younger players or younger coaches. He will look for a change in anything that is not the way they have done things all season.
+ The OSU defensive staff is impressed with Iowa’s offensive skill and the offensive line is the first or second-best they’ve seen this year. Linebacker Josey Jewell is very good. Meyer loves him and Jewell plays football the right way like Iowa always has.
+ Meyer doesn’t think the days of coaches being around for 20 years is going to last much longer. Iowa is a model of consistency, which you would expect out of Iowa people and midwestern people.
+ The offense against Penn State played well, especially against one of the best defenses in the nation. The fourth quarter was extraordinary, aside from the fumble. The kicking debacle was troubling, but the offense was pleasing.
+ Kickoff coverage will have some changes in personnel. “Have to keep re-evaluating.”
The kicking team should . . .
The kicking team would always have a guy that is wider than everyone else, a contain guy. That has not been the case for OSU. That is a problem with the scheme. Look at the long return by the Penn State linebacker. He went to the wide open spaces left open by not having any contain guy. It’s more than a mistake. It is a flaw in the scheme.
I partly agree. The same scheme worked well in previous years. I think it’s more execution than the scheme. Our guys don’t stay in their lanes. They get blocked into each other easily and create wide seams. Maybe a more standard scheme would help them execute better.
Not sure I understand the approach to put our entire kick coverage unit on one side of the field. Teams are obviously scheming to return the kick to the uncovered side which is what both penn state and Maryland did to us resulting in touchdowns. Maybe a more conventional approach to spread the unit across the entire field and have our kicker kick the ball as far with as much hang time as possible to the middle of the field and cover it.
You’re right to a point, Tim. The idea behind what Meyer tries to do I agree with – make it very difficult to get the ball past the 20, effectively giving your defense more ‘breathing room’ each possession after a kick. If proper lane integrity is maintained, Meyer’s approach is deadly (witness just how many kicks have been bottled inside the 20 and even inside the 15). Where it breaks down is when a seam can be created (Barkley didn’t run fully around the coverage but his blockers created a seam to pop him) or the “right edge” of the formation comes in too ‘steep’ to give a returner a gap around the edge is where you see huge returns. It’s really not the scheme but the execution that’s been bad at times.
Right, so if the execution is failing, the coaches must adapt to something that doesn’t fail! It becomes chicken vs egg at that point- is the scheme failing because of the players, or the players failing because of the scheme? Answer: it doesn’t matter, CHANGE IT! Its very odd- “odd” being about the kindest word I can muster- that Meyer insists on trying to ram a square peg inside a round hole on this return nonsense. ‘You’re going to keep doing it my way at even if it kill us!” People who fawn over him and insist Kerry Coombs is the mastermind are fooling themselves. This is a perfect example of the (now) hackneyed comment on insanity- when you keep doing the same failing thing again and again, foolishly hoping for a different result, you’ve lost your marbles. Its time for fresh eyes who don’t have to worry about Urban Meyer’s “special teams expertise” to re-work this mess. Probably not gonna happen, probably going to kill us in a close game like it nearly did this time.
Players should be able to stay in a lane and tackle though, right?
Good heavens- what they are doing is FAILING! Say it with me…FAILING. That unit’s failures were easily the most glaring example of how Penn State was not merely able to keep it close but to actually have a monster lead, despite the total yardage landslide by OSU. Put the koolaid glass down- don’t worry, just for a moment- and recall that you were going berserk for 55 minutes of the game, often because of the special teams problems. and justifiably. Not sure where the “new personnel” will come from, sounds like a way to shift blame to me. The coaches need to suppress whatever ego(s) are acting up and look in the mirror on this one. The players didn’t somehow forget how to tackle!!
No kool-aid here. Players and coaches are both at fault. If your players can’t do what you want them to, you have to start asking them to do something else. Coaches have to adapt to their personnel and Meyer has not done that yet.
The kicker must put the ball on the goal-line, between the numbers and the sideline. It’s not a trivial task. . . especially turning an autumn wind. So while we talk about coverage, there is more to execution by the personnel than just the coverage.
With that being said, if coverage hinges mostly on kick placement, then the scheme is too high-risk.
Thing is, this scheme has worked well for the majority of Meyer’s tenure here, so I still tend to agree that it’s a coverage personnel execution issue.