Kirk Herbstreit: Ryan Day time with the defense showed on out of rhythm offense

Kirk Herbstreit believes Ryan Day needs to find a balance. After spending time trying to fix the Ohio State defense, Herbstreit believes Day may have been on the wrong side of the seesaw too long.

“He spent a lot of time during team work with the defense, and I think it showed on the offense,” said Herbstreit. “They were almost just like — I don’t know, they didn’t have a rhythm to it.

“I mean, TreVeyon Henderson, as we said in preseason — this kid’s going to be Ezekiel Elliott, J.K. Dobbins, Henderson … he’s that type of guy. He’s a freak. So he made a lot of things look good. But they were out of rhythm. They gotta find themselves, because obviously it’s going to get a lot tougher when they get in conference play.”

Aside from the aforementioned TreVeyon Henderson, the Ohio State offense sputtered against Tulsa. However, Henderson‘s 277 yard, three touchdown day masked some of their problems.

As they enter Big Ten conference play with one Oregon sized loss on their resume, the Buckeyes have to win out for a chance to make the College Football Playoff. If that’s going to happen, Herbstreit believes Day can’t lose his offense at the expense of his defense.

Herbstreit: ‘I don’t know if it’s something you can fix’

Evidently, Herbstreit believes it may be too late for Day to change his defense. Moreover, he spoke about how he has his reservations about Ohio State adjusting their defensive scheme,

“I don’t know if it’s something you can fix in the middle of the season,” said Herbstreit. “You can tweak it, like Ryan Day’s mentioned. Try to make some changes to the staff, but you’ve kind of trained these guys to be a single high defense.

“Which means cover three .. with a lot of deep coverage, try to prevent the big play. Or cover one .. where against Oregon they were picked on. It’s hard for people that don’t understand — it’s not something that you drill and that’s you DNA and that’s who you are, and then no problem, let’s go to a quarters coverage. Or let’s go to cover two. That takes a year of training. To be really good and confident in it, it takes a spring ball to implement a defense, work on technique .. eyes need to be here. It’s not just on a Thursday, hey — we’re gonna play cover two now.

“They’ve got their hands full the rest of the year.”

While Ohio State had huge expectations for 2021, it all could be derailed by their subpar defense. With games against Akron, Rutgers and Maryland coming up, the Buckeyes have to figure things out sooner rather than later.

Perhaps the best Ohio State defense is more offense. If Kirk Herbstreit is right, Ryan Day better spend more time with them in the coming weeks.