Man, lot to unpack from this one.
The defense...woof. That was the worst defensive performance in years. They just flat out got their asses beat. The DL did absolutely nothing the entire game. Denzel Burke had the worst game of his career (and he's had plenty of bad ones, probably the weirdest career for an OSU player that I can remember). The tackling was laughably bad. Just flat out god awful execution across the board. Ransom makes a nice play on the 2 point attempt and his slow ass gets caught from behind. And where are his teammates to block for him? Those 2 points would have been huge, obviously. Just a pathetic display from the defense across the board that frankly I didn't think was possible from this team especially given how good they were last year.
Ryan Day...these losses in big games are becoming way too familiar. The lack of situational awareness and clock mismanagement in this game was mindblowing. How can you not be wary of an onside kick from the 50? Why are you not calling timeouts before the 2 minute warning and just letting precious seconds go to waste? He also obviously did not know the clock would continue running after the penalty at the end. Ending that game with a timeout in your pocket is coaching malpractice. I also feel like Day overreacts to situations that have happened in the past. He heard the criticism from the lack of aggressiveness at the end of the Georgia game and because of that was way too aggressive at the end of this game. We had the ball at the 28 yard line with 40+ seconds and a timeout. How in the fuck are we continuing to only throw the ball at that point? It just doesn't make sense. He took a ton of heat for handing the ball off to Hayden for one play in that Georgia game, but that was the right thing to do! It just didn't work out, and that happens sometimes. So this time we go full air raid and guess what, we get a soft ass OPI call that essentially ended the game. Just fucking stupid shit. The guy really just can't get out of his own way in big moments and it's starting to look like this is just who he is. How he & the team respond to this is going to be huge because his job should absolutely be on the line right now as far as I'm concerned.
If there's any positive to take from this game, it's that Will Howard answered all the questions (boneheaded final play aside). He was fantastic in this game, put the team on his back and did everything to win this game. And with competent coaching, would have won. Concerns about him are gone, at least for me.
Overall, a weird fucking game. It was very Brownsy in that sense. This loss sucks right now, a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, this team still has everything in front of them and I think they can do it. I would love our chances in a rematch with Oregon on a neutral field. But Day needs to wake the fuck up and so does the defense.