Talent, Motivation and Gameplan
There are three essential ingrediants to winning football games. You need talent, you need motivation and you need a good gameplan.
tOSU clearly has the talent -- thanks to good recruiting by the coaching staff.
tOSU seems to have the motivation -- great players, who are used to winning, like to keep winning. They are embarrassed and angry when they don't. It's possible that tOSU team is not sufficiently motivated -- we can't get into their brains to know for sure -- but it's unlikely.
So, that leaves gameplan. This element is entirely the responsibility of the coaching staff, the head coach in particular. Throughout most of this season it has been difficult to tell exactly what tOSU gameplan is. Are they smash-mouth runners? ...spread formation fun-and-gunners? What's the plan exactly, anyway?
The one group that seems to know exactly what tOSU gameplan is are opposing coaches. They have had no trouble at all analyzing Buckeye tendencies and devising strategies to attack them successfully. On offense and defense, tOSU has become so predictable that much weaker BigTen teams, who have had three-plus years now to learn Tresselball, are able to counteract anything and everything tOSU does. It's slightly tougher for out of conference opponents, who only play tOSU every decade or so. But for Big Ten coaches, there is absolutely no mystery to Tresselball. It has become obvious to diagnose and simple to defeat.
I have faith that JT will adapt and adjust. He's too smart not to. At some level he has to know that, as the old saying goes, "Insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different outcome". He may be obsessive/compulsive, but he ain't crazy. Is he?
