Buckeye Blogger NetworkA bit of a different version of WDYWTSOS, since we all want to see the same thing- Awesomeness and no injuries.
So, we’ve polled our staff of experts for their predictions on the following aspects for “Getting Down At Paul Brown”- let’s see how much everyone’s been paying attention to the Spring Practice Updates:
Bombs Away
What player scores the first points of the game?
WVa: Braxton Miller will score first and it will be on a long run.
Ken: Devin Smith on a long pass play from The Brax
Jason: Rod Smith. My bet is they limit Hyde and with Brax wearing the black shirt his running is cut out.
Janelle: Devin Smith on a deep ball from Braxton
Eric: Might as well ask what your favorite color of M&M is based on the taste. I’ll go with Michael Thomas on a nice Brax pass.
Dexter: I’m going to go with Evan Spencer on a Bomb downfield from Braxton Miller. That is my favorite color M&M.
Charles: To be a bit different, I’ll go with Drew Basil
Mali: The obvious answer is Drew Basil.
Who’s the offensive MVP? Read More
Spring is finally in the air. Baseball season is underway. Saturday is the annual Scarlet and Grey game. Basketball has crowned its national champion. It’s Wednesday, let’s rumble!
Buckeye football
We’ve hit the stretch run of spring football and the Scarlet and Grey game is being held this Saturday at Cincinnati’s Paul Brown Brown Stadium. The game starts at 1pm and you can hear it live on the flagship station for Buckeye sports 97.1FM or www.971thefan.com It will be shown on the Big Ten Network at 7pm Saturday night.
Braxton Miller
Student Appreciation Day
One of the highlights of the 2012 spring camp was the first ever Student Appreciation Day at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center. Don’t be cynical, the name implies exactly what it is: a chance for the football team to allow unprecedented access to the students who make up the body of this great university and support it so vehemently on Saturday’s in Ohio Stadium and even on the road in opposing dojos. Read More
Basketball’s regular season is in the books. It’s officially time to get serious: Its tournament time. It’s also Wednesday night and you know what that means… Let’s rumble!
Hoops on Hoops
The Buckeyes finished the regular season Sunday with a 13 point home win over Illinois. They finish with a record of 23-7, good for a tie for second place in the Big Ten and the number two overall seed in the Big Ten Tournament. They now await tomorrow’s winner of Purdue vs Nebraska and will play Friday at 6:30 eastern on the Big Ten Network.
Deshaun Thomas, Lenzelle Smith and Aaron Craft during the 2012 tournaments
Buckle Up
As a part of the 2012 season, the Buckeye Bloggers Network is pooling their expertise to give Ohio State fans the most in-depth coverage possible for Saturday’s game.
This week tBBC looks at the special teams matchup with the Miami University RedHawks . Be sure to check out the rest of this series via the links at the bottom of this post!
As the Buckeyes look to start the Urban Meyer era, there will be many changes that fans will experience.
However, the emphasis on solid special teams, a hallmark of the previous administration, will continue under the new regime… and perhaps even be more of a point of pride.
Like the Vest, Coach Meyer has called the punt the most important play in the game. Indeed, the fact that he has taken charge of the Special Forces’ planning and preparation highlights that the man is serious about the kicking game. While at Florida, this was certainly evident- the Gators prided themselves on their ability to aggressively get after the punt and the fact that their return teams were almost expected to score every time the ball was on it’s way.
Instead of being another time to gather a fresh beverage, Buckeye fans will need to stay glued to their seats during the specialists’ time on the stage.
Murphy meets Meyer, 2010
But before we look at what the 2012 version of the OSU Special Forces will be, let’s take a gander at the visitors from Oxford. The RedHawks return a good portion of their specialists from 2011, including punter Zac Murphy and kicker Mason Krysinski.
Murphy, a former walk on who earned third team MAC honors as a freshman, averages 39.1 yards per punt in each of his first two seasons, as well as having a long of 66 yards to his name. He was also responsible for dropping 13 punts inside the 20 last year, but had two kicks blocked in the 2011 campaign.
Krysinski, a 3.98 GPA student, struggled a bit in 2011. To go with his season long 45 yard FG against Bowling Green, he averages 56 yards a kickoff with only one touchback. It will be interesting to see if his numbers improve with the change in NCAA guidelines regarding kicks this season… and no better time to experiment than the first game of the season. He was 2-6 in field goals, and missed four extra points in 2011.
At this point, return specialists have not yet been identified, although the Miami media guide indicates that 50% of the punt return yards and 98% of the kick return yards return for the 2012 campaign. My guess is that, barring a new face deep to receive (Freddie McRae?), we might see defensive back Dayonne Nunley or receiver Dawan Scott awaiting kicks.
The RedHawks coverage team excelled at times last year, holding punt returns to a 7 yard average and kickoff returns to just over 14 yards per attempt. They allowed one punt return for a TD, and scored none themselves.
Ok. Now to the good guys. Read More
Well Buckeye fans, we are halfway home to the end of the 2011 season. Standing at 4-3 overall and 1-2 in the B1G, this year has been some dizzying highs (winning the Sugar Bowl) and far too many lowest of lows. The real question is where the Ohio State Buckeyes grade out for the first half of the season and keys to improvement. Players and coaches will be broken down and evaluated on their performance so far. So, listen up scarlet and gray clad coaches and players. Professor Schmidbauer is here to hand out some first half grades.
Quarterback
Breakdown: Anyone wondering what kind of faith the offensive coaches had in Braxton
Still Learning
Miller got a pretty good idea as to how much last Saturday in Champaign. The play as a whole has been pretty poor sans two games for the Buckeye signal callers. Joe Bauserman’s initial start against Akron was a solid debut for the resident geriatric of Ohio State. Braxton Miller’s first start against the Colorado Buffaloes was a nice debut as well. The rest of the performances have been lackluster, and I think we would all agree that is putting it kindly. Now the team is officially Miller’s and it seems like the Buckeyes can ride him as far as the freshman can carry them, well assuming there is not a strong wind anyway.
Area to Improve: If there is one key to the Buckeye season reaching eight or, dare I say, nine wins, it has to be the passing game. Ohio State proved you can win a game by only completing one pass, but it goes without saying we don’t want to see if the team can accomplish that feat again. Braxton Miller has not been able to consistently make throws in big spots in games yet, and opponents know that. You can believe that a serviceable passing will be a necessity to reach a New Year’s Day bowl game. Read More
Your weekly update from the Ohio State press conference as well as notes from around the world of college sports- this week, we take a pointed look at the NCAA after the jump.
Usually we reserve soundtracks for TWTW, but someone emailed me a song today that I thought I’d share. They described it as “a warning to South Beach re: Mr. John Simon“… enjoy.
Buckeye News
As the days grow shorter, so too do the press conferences. Here’s what we’ve got:
Buckeye 411
They do what they do and they do it so well. They believe in it. Their players believe in it. They’re very, very physical at what they do and the schemes back that. They want to be a balanced offense and they’ve probably, over the past couple years, gotten more balanced, and so they’re not going to change. Now, they may change a little play they run because of what people are doing against them or they — in ’06 they blitzed us a lot more than they ever did. They came after us pretty good, but it was within their system. It wasn’t as if they’d never run those blitzes, they just did their blitzes rather than eight percent of the time they did it 15 percent of the time and it felt like they were blitzing every down, that’s what you admire about them, that’s what you admire about Penn State, that’s why you come out, we got behind Penn State and that wasn’t a shock to me that we were behind Penn State, Penn State plays their defense, they play their offense, they do what they do, they’re very capable as anyone else is, they have good athletes. How we were behind was a little bothersome, but scheme-wise, the good teams, they’re going to do what they do, and Iowa will do that.
REPORTER: Your players talked after the game about the, job if speech is the right word, but the talk you gave them before they went back out for the second half and just did you feel disappointed that you had to make that speech at that point or that you needed something like that and just what were your thoughts there during that? Did you think you were at kind of a junction of the season there a little bit?
COACH TRESSEL: I was disappointed that we weren’t playing like we were capable of playing. We’ve all been in games where you’ve played as well as you could and you lost and that happens, or you played as well as you could but you made those two mistakes and, therefore, you lost. I didn’t think we were playing anywhere near we were capable of playing and we were playing against a team that they knew was good. We play them every year, it’s not like we hadn’t played them in a while, and we were playing in our stadium and all the rest, and at this time of year when you’re supposed to have been improved, so, yeah, I was disappointed in our — and up until that stop, I wasn’t disappointed in that, in fact, I was energized by that, but disappointed up to that point.
REPORTER: How often do you have to go to that big halftime speech to get your guys motivated?
COACH TRESSEL: You only do what’s going on in the course of the moment, so you don’t sit there saying, okay, it’s game seven and I haven’t played that card because you can’t play a card. I mean, you have to react to what’s going on and, you know, typically what’s going on is that we’re playing near to our ability and we’re maybe not doing some little things, it’s atypical that we just weren’t ourselves.
I really can’t repeat that. He got pretty animated. He definitely, you know, spilled his heart out to us and he challenged us, he challenged us to go out there the first play, you know, the kickoff team to make an impression and defense to get a stop and once we got the ball back in the huddle, he was like, you know, we had those — we had that penalty and then we had another penalty, but his attitude didn’t change. His eyebrows didn’t go up. They were still down. And he was like, well, let’s just make the drive a little bit longer.
They’re a little bit thicker on you, a little bit stronger on you…
Apologies for the tardiness, the “Fastest recap on the web” seemingly had the same issues that the Buckeye offense did today. These are my quick thoughts; Jim will bring more insight on Monday:
Defense
