Buckeyes keep Ducks weapons in check
The first time Todd Denlinger saw the Oregon offense on film, it left him a bit queasy.
“You watch and you wonder what you can do against them,” the Ohio State defensive lineman said. “They blew by everybody.”
Until Friday.
That’s when the Pacific 10 Conference’s unstoppable force ran into Ohio State’s immovable object.
It wasn’t much of a collision, with the Buckeyes’ defense thoroughly dominating seventh-ranked Oregon in a 26-17 Rose Bowl victory.
Consider:
Oregon quarterback Jeremiah Masoli, who came in averaging 248 yards in total offense per game, got 90 on Friday.
Running back LaMichael James, who had run for at least 117 yards in seven consecutive games, was held to 70.
And a Ducks team that had averaged nearly 38 points a game fell three touchdowns short of that.
Credit Ohio State’s defensive coordinator Jim Heacock, who decided the best way to tackle Oregon’s complex offense was by keeping his defense as basic as possible.
“Defense is a simple game,” he said. “You get 11 guys executing, you’ve got a chance. If they’re good players and if they’re playing hard, you’ve got a better chance.
“It’s not Earth science.”
Which isn’t to say it doesn’t involve some thought. In preparing for Oregon’s hurry-up no-huddle offense, Heacock thought the Buckeyes would have trouble making personnel changes and running complicated defensive schemes. So he ripped entire sections from the playbook, winnowing it down to five or six base formations.
“We kept it real vanilla and we just let guys fly around,” Denlinger said. “We didn’t try to confuse them too much. We just played our base defense, let guys run around and make plays.”
Which fit in nicely with the motto Ohio State’s selfless defense adopted this season: No Names, No Worries, No Blame.
“We didn’t have a lot of big-name guys like we used to have the past couple of years, but we stuck together and we didn’t point fingers,” Denlinger said. “If there were mistakes made, we gathered around each other and got better.
“Not one guy stood out. But everybody was there around the ball.”
The guy who was around the ball most often was junior linebacker Ross Homan, who had a game-high 12 tackles and a second-quarter interception that set up a field goal, giving eighth-ranked Ohio State a 16-10 halftime lead.
The last time Oregon was held to 10 points in a half, the Dodgers were still playing.
The second half was even worse for the Ducks.
“It was a great challenge and we took it up. I knew it would work,” Homan said of the game plan, which often required him to shadow, or “spy” Masoli, the Oregon player who concerned the Buckeyes the most.
“We talked about not stopping him, but slowing him down,” senior linebacker Austin Spitler said. “We had to get pressure on him. And that’s what we did. We had to make him make quick decisions because you put him in bad situations when you do that.”
Bad situations are something the soft-spoken Heacock made sure his defense avoided.
“Our defense is simple, but it’s one that you have to execute,” he said. “One thing we could do is screw them up by trying to do too much. The whole key was to get 11 guys playing hard and playing fast. You play fast when you know what you’re doing. And I felt like they knew what they were doing.
“You can’t give the players enough credit. They made the plays.”
