'TUNNEL VISION': OHIO STATE’S MARGIN FOR ERROR IS GONE, SO ALL OF ITS ATTENTION IS NOW SOLELY ON NORTHWESTERN
On one of the doors at Ohio State’s indoor practice facility sits not one, but two signs that read ‘Beat Northwestern.’ The giant video board, which once declared the Woody Hayes Athletic Center to be ‘the land of the wolves,’ no longer displays that mantra. “Beat Northwestern,” it reads.
There’s a clear message around the team this week. Nothing else matters.
“It’s gotta be tunnel vision,” senior center Pat Elflein says. “There’s no other option.”
This is hardly a new thing in football and in sports. The “one game at a time” saying is one of the oldest clichés in the book. But Urban Meyer and some of his players admitted Wednesday after practice it might have been hard to ignore a lot of the outside talk.
Ohio State entered last Saturday’s game against Penn State as the No. 2-ranked team in the country. Most had the Buckeyes pegged as serious College Football Playoff contenders — and most still do despite a loss to the Nittany Lions — and many were already starting to look ahead to the Nov. 26 showdown with archrival Michigan.
“It’s a little bit a product of the College Football Playoff and it’s a product of — because it’s such attention and great for the sport, great for us,” Meyer said. “We’re such a young team, we better focus on playing a young team that’s on a roll right now so that’s the reason we do that. It’s just focus.”
“I think this week the focus has really just been we’re playing Northwestern and we can’t get ahead of ourselves,” senior linebacker Joe Burger added. “Some of that might have happened the past couple of weeks. Everyone is trying to blow up The Game and right now we’ve blocked off everything else and we’ve focused on what’s happening this Saturday.”
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