Rapid Reaction: Buckeyes open season with rocky win at Indiana
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Ohio State coach Ryan Day has been in this position before.
First-time starter at quarterback with a retooled offensive line. Road conference game to open the year. Sound familiar? It happened in 2021, when the Buckeyes faced Minnesota on the road to start the campaign and came home with a double-digit win, but a clunky one.
The ingredients — and ultimately, the result — was all too similar Saturday afternoon in a 23-3 Ohio State win inside Memorial Stadium. New signal-caller. New offensive line. Clunky performance. 1-0 record with a lot of room for improvement.
Day knows this feeling all too well.
“When you look at those games, you just have to get the first win,” Day said in his postgame press conference. “And that’s really what you need to do. And then you identify it, because there’s just unknowns when you have guys who are starting for the first time and then you can kind of identify and grow from there. So the goal is to win the first game, you know, you don’t need to play your best football in the first game of the year. But you have to grow from it, you have to make sure that win’s under your belt because you know, a few weeks, nobody cares, the win’s a win, and then you move on.
“But the goal is to get it and then we have to grow immediately after.”
To be perfectly clear: Ohio State has a lot to clean up after Week 1. The Buckeyes offensive line was leaky for most of the afternoon, hampering the talented stable of running backs. Starting quarterback Kyle McCord had his share of ups and downs, missing open receivers and throwing an interception. But he also showed why Day trusted him with the offense in a road conference game to open the season with a few wow moments with touch throws.
The Buckeyes were certainly tentative Saturday afternoon, and Day is the first to admit it. That’s not a bad thing on the road in Week 1. Especially considering that a win is a win, and the Buckeyes won by 20.
“What you can’t do is take a bunch of chances and be reckless and all of a sudden put yourself at risk of losing the game,” he said. “Probably could have been a little bit more aggressive at times today, but the No. 1 goal is to get the win and move forward. There’s going to have to be times we’re going to have to be more aggressive for sure. But I’m talking offense. I mean, I love the defense. I’m allowed to talk about the defense, so I want to smile. If we play defense like this, we’re going to have a chance.
“Certainly bigger challenges ahead.”
With bigger challenges ahead, Ohio State and Ryan Day can rely on past experiences in similar situations —and what they’ll learn in the weeks ahead about this edition of the Buckeyes — to make sure each performance becomes less of the clunker they had at Indiana.
