Ohio State Football: Week 8 Unit Grades vs. Purdue
4th Quarter:
Offense:
The Buckeyes were able to respond to a Purdue touchdown at the beginning of this quarter with a two-minute and three-second drive that ended with a Dwayne Haskins 32 yard touchdown pass to Johnnie Dixon.
This is seemingly the only way that the Buckeyes can score this season, and the Buckeyes were finally able to put it into the end zone after trailing by three scores.
The Buckeyes would answer yet another Purdue touchdown with a long touchdown pass from Dwayne Haskins to Terry McLaurin.
It is supposed to be an exciting thing when your team scores, especially in the fourth quarter. But it just made me more frustrated that we weren’t doing this earlier in the game when the defense was getting enough stops for Ohio State to make a comeback.
If this game wasn’t already frustrating enough for Buckeye fans, Dwayne Haskins throwing a pick six at the end of the game helped it reach the boiling point. Being fair, its hard to fault Haskins as was down three scores and just looking to find something when he threw a risky pass that went the other way.
If there was a stat that showed the struggles of the Buckeye offense in this game. It was the 73 throws that Dwayne Haskins attempted, an Ohio State record. That stat shows just how one-dimensional the offense was in this game.
Grade: B
Defense:
I commended the defense in the last quarter for not giving up that many big plays and giving the offense chances to come back in this game. They needed to do more of that in this quarter if Ohio State had any prayer of winning this game.
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They did the exact opposite of that giving up two huge run plays for touchdowns in the final quarter. To add insult to injury, the offense finally started scoring touchdowns in the quarter when the defense wasn’t making stops.
Purdue would score another touchdown thanks to poor tackling and the Boilermakers successfully managed to score the same amount of touchdowns in the fourth quarter as they had in the previous three.
Grade: F
Special Teams:
Special teams tend to take a back seat a lot of times when trailing big in the fourth. This is the case here as the only really notable special teams play was the failed onside kick with about 4 minutes left in the game.
Loss highlights problems within program. dark. Next
Disaster almost hit with Johnnie Dixon fielding a punt late that didn’t make it to the end zone. He barely managed to make it out of the end zone though.
Grade: C