There were myriad factors that made it harder than it needed to be for Ohio State to finish Saturday with a win over Indiana — sloppy penalties, questionable refereeing, and costly injuries all factored in, and only one of those things was within the Buckeyes’ control.
But perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the game for me was watching a very good offense—one that had, until Julian Sayin’s injury, a 2025 Heisman finalist at quarterback and a 2026 Heisman frontrunner Jeremiah Smith as the wide receiver—look like a fish out of water.
Some of this was due to those aforementioned penalties. Some of this was due to Sayin’s injury. Some of it was just plain lackluster performances: Prior to being injured, Sayin was playing the worst game of his career, and the Buckeyes were held to just 78 yards on the ground.
But the most egregious contributor, for me, was the offensive playcalling, and truthfully, it’s hard for me to separate how much of the battle was performance-based and how much of it was the fault of the offensive playcalling, which wavered between all-too-predictable and completely mind-boggling.
Let’s start with the predictable. Arthur Smith and Ryan Day surely have more football know-how than I do, and it’s easy to critique their decision-making from my couch without full visibility into their thought process. With that in mind, however, it’s not the first time it’s felt like I was watching a coach try to force plays that simply weren’t working. There were several drives that were so rush-heavy that I knew what play the Buckeyes were going to run before the ball was snapped (often, it involved Bo Jackson running right up the middle despite having no available lane, and often, it meant gaining little-to-no yardage). If their plays were that predictable to me, of course they were obvious to Curt Cignetti’s Hoosiers.
Throughout the game, their red zone offense struggled, and they were forced to settle for a field goal on two separate trips to the red zone.
The lack of agility in the Buckeyes’ offensive decisionmaking has become increasingly frustrating over the years. When they’re at their best, they adjust the game plan as they go based on what’s working and what’s not working. When they’ve been at their most frustrating (think all those Michigan games when Day got in his own way), it often resulted from a refusal to pivot. Saturday felt like a return to this stubborn approach, and it quite nearly cost the Buckeyes the game.
Surely, Day and Smith can put their heads together and come up with something more creative than what we saw Saturday. With all that talent on the field, there must be a way to do something their opponent won’t see coming from a mile away.
But perhaps more infuriating were the head-scratcher calls, the ones that felt like Day and Smith were trying to do exactly what I just asked of them and throw their opponents for a loop. That’s exactly what I want them to do, but I never want to see it involve the choice to take Jeremiah Smith out of the game. Barring an injury (which, I need to clarify, Ohio State cannot afford), Smith should never be on the sidelines when the offense is on the field.
When you have the best player in college football on your roster, his mere presence on the field impacts the game. If he’s out there, your opponents have to be prepared for the possibility that you’re going to get the ball to him, and it allows him to function as a decoy. And yet, for a few plays on Saturday, Smith stood on the sidelines while his teammates were in the red zone.
If you have been more successful at blocking this drive from your memory than I have, allow me to remind you: The Buckeyes were within the Indiana 2-yard line and ran three consecutive plays without gaining a single yard. When Smith finally re-entered the game on fourth down, guess who Indiana put all their guys on?
Because the Hoosiers covered Smith so closely, it left Bo Jackson wide open for Ohio State, allowing Sayin to find Jackson in the end zone for a critical touchdown before halftime.
If all of this was a fluke, just jitters brought on by facing the team that defeated Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship last year, I could certainly take the win with a smile and let the rest lie. However, the Buckeyes are now without Sayin for “several weeks” with an injury to his throwing shoulder, and after this weekend’s bye, they will continue through a brutal stretch of their schedule: No. 16 USC on the road on Halloween, Oregon and No. 24 Northwestern at home on Nov. 7 and Nov. 14, respectively, a trip to Nebraska, and then The Game to finish the regular season.
Realistically, they can afford just one more loss if they want to keep their playoff hopes alive.
I’m certainly not ready to write backup quarterback Luke Fahey off after just a few drives against Indiana, though they weren’t pretty. He’s got the week off to settle in with his team, and until we see what he pulls off against USC, I’m not ready to make any judgments one way or another. But if Fahey is going to lead this team to victory in Southern California, or at home against Oregon or Northwestern, it’s going to start, first and foremost, with the playcalling.
Fahey isn’t the only one affected, either. On the whole, the offense wasn’t set up for success last weekend, and though they weren’t perfect in their execution either, you have to wonder if some of the shakiness stemmed from the fact that the playcalling wasn’t working.
The Buckeyes cannot afford to predictably run the football over and over and pray it will work on the umpteenth try, nor can they afford to be so predictable through the air that they’re turning the ball over. They will need both their passing and rushing game, but they’ll have to come up with something a little more imaginative.
If they can do that, they might still be in business come playoffs, albeit maybe a little worse for wear. But if they can’t rethink the offensive approach, I’m not sure this team will still be playing football in December.