Ohio State Football: Resurgence of tight ends pivotal to Buckeyes’ success
By Andrew Smith
The success of the Ohio State offense in 2019 could depend on how the tight ends are used. They have been missing in action lately.
In recent years I’ve noticed more and more how difficult it has been for the Ohio State offense to work the center of the field. It’s something that I never thought would be the case, especially given how important the tight end position has been for the program in the past.
During the Jim Tressel era, there were countless instances of Ohio State getting out of a bind thanks in large part to a long pass down the middle of the field to a tight end. When Urban Meyer took over for the program in 2012, I expected more of the same given that Urban was no stranger to using tight ends within his offensive schemes.
While things seemed to head down the same path during his first year of coaching, somewhere along the way coach Meyer decided to stop throwing the ball to the to tight ends. This was okay for a while, but once the Buckeyes couldn’t get the run game going they began to struggle.
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The downfield passes weren’t connecting and the offense needed to find a solution. The simple one would have been to throw a pass down the middle to one of our very good tight ends, but instead Meyer decided to institute the slant pass.
It’s a great option when you have fast receivers and the defense doesn’t know it’s coming, but Urban developed a habit of calling it almost every time.
What was so maddening for me about the whole sequence of events though wasn’t the fact that coach Meyer was so dead set on calling such a play, it was the fact that on the rare occasion he did call a pass down the middle, it worked.
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Given the long history of great tight ends at Ohio State, I’m hoping Ryan Day can turn things around and bring forth a dynamic and explosive offense that defenses will once again fear. And that the tight ends will an important part of his explosive offense.