By: Chris Brown (Yahoo Sports) –
There’s no sugar-coating this: Jim Tressel and his staff were outcoached against Southern Cal and Pete Carroll, . Again. Particularly on offense, Ohio State’s gameplan against the Trojans was utter rubbish, and it failed to meet the number one requirement of every gameplan: put your players in position to succeed.

When I watched the game live, I was struck by what I considered poor playcalling and mediocre execution. But after watching the game again in detail, going over replays and studying all the players, I’m convinced the situation in Columbus is nearly hopeless. For all the talk of Tressel’s buttoned-down, conservative approach, and how his teams don’t make mistakes, the most basic and fundamental errors permeated throughout Ohio State’s offensive plan like cancer in its late stages, and the only conclusion I could draw from this game is that Tressel — whatever he may be as a motivator, a recruiter, a teacher of technique or as a disciplinarian — is not up to the challenge of leading his team past others that equal his in talent. He is not good enough of a tactician to win against the national elite who, unlike practically everyone he schemes against in his conference, have the talent to match Ohio State’s, and those are the only games where coaching really matters. With his facilities, talent, and resources, winning the Big Ten is not the test.

Look at the numbers. Ohio State’s failure to beat a quality opponent since defeating Michigan to punch a ticket to the national championship game in 2006, Tressel’s teams have been outclassed, outsmarted, outplayed and outprepared in every big game they’ve played.

Yet the saddest part about the Buckeyes’ 18-15 loss to the Trojans is that, for the first time in the last few tries against similar opponents, the Buckeyes were not outplayed. That’s what made Saturday night’s performance almost disgusting: OSU’s players played a hard, fast and determined game; the crowd in Columbus seemed nothing short of unreal; and the pomp and majesty of playing there more than drowned out USC’s exotic traveling road show, known to transform opposing stadiums into home venues. No, this loss falls squarely on the coaching staff. And the fissures run deep.
Note that I had no stake in this game. I don’t really follow either team that closely, and to be honest I can have a kind of sterilized, academic approach to football that focuses (maybe too much) on schemes, coaches, and the overall structure and flow of a game. Sometimes this leads to my undervaluing the importance of a gutsy or amazing performances by players that change how a game turns out, but my view also lays bare the raw injustice when players and fans commit everything to their team, only to have their efforts undermined and them made to look foolish simply because the plan of attack lacked any insight or creativity or was just generally too insipid to be overcome by any individual effort. Against USC, although the final score was close, the Buckeyes never really had a chance; 15 points will never get you a victory against Southern Cal. (Imagine if Mark Sanchez had started for the Trojans?) Football might merely be a game, but seeing the talent gone to waste through the insipience of their superiors will always be too much to bear.

Tragicomic. As I said, when I watched the game live I simply thought OSU could have deployed Terrelle Pryor better than it had. But re-watching the game exposed a lot of tactical mistakes by the Buckeyes, almost all of which made it exceptionally difficult for them to move the ball.

First and most obviously, OSU never once called the zone-read play. Never mind that last year it was the Buckeyes’ only effective play against USC, averaging more than 6.8 yards per attempt; Saturday, the Buckeyes averaged a gangrenous 2.7 yards per carry, a number that infected the rest of the the simple-minded affair that the Buckeyes called a playbook, especially considering that the number is inflated by Pryor’s third-and-long runs against umbrella coverage. Ohio State tailback Boom Herron averaged a mere 2.4 yards, and his longest gain was eight yards.

When I previewed this game, I said that mobile quarterbacks presented Pete Carroll with a math problem: How do you cover all of a team’s receivers, guard the box for the run game, and account for the mobile quarterback? Fortunately for Carroll, he didn’t have to solve this tricky arithmetic problem because Jim Tressel can’t count.

Indeed, the overrated Senator Sweatervest essentially gave away one of his most important tactical advantages by not understanding the concept of constraint plays. Routinely, the Buckeyes lined up with two or three receivers. USC managed to play their preferred two-deep defense much of the game, which should have meant that OSU had a favorable box to run in. Except OSU forgot to make USC care whether it had its receivers split out.

USC literally lined no one up over the slot receivers, and yet not once did Tressel instruct Pryor to immediately take the snap and throw the bubble screen. For most teams this is an automatic check or sight-adjustment, and it is by no means difficult (every high school runs it). Unless you force the defense to care that you are spreading the field, then all you’re doing is hurting yourself; Tressel would have been better keeping an extra fullback in the game. Thus the rushing results were obvious. In the diagram above, USC has only one safety back and eight guys in the box, compared to seven blockers for OSU, not counting Pryor. Tressel called an inside handoff that was stuffed — USC had more guys than OSU could block.

But when OSU wanted to go to the bubble screen, boy did you know it. OSU used the most idiotic formation, where they split one running back/slot out wide but kept him back at six yards deep in the backfield, where he was a threat to do nothing but run a bubble screen.

Were the intended receiver lined up near the line he would be a threat to run a normal route or get vertical, but instead OSU preferred to announce its intentions ahead of time. Pryor never threw the bubble because it was always resoundingly covered. And, even worse, this let the defense completely eliminate…..

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