Ohio State football: Winners, losers from OSU vs. Oregon

While the linebackers are young, they were responsible for giving up many big plays on the afternoon.

Coming into this game, one of the biggest concerns for Ohio State was their linebacker play. The group is talented but young and struggled against Minnesota. Knowing that Oregon is so talented at running back and has a quarterback who can beat you on the ground, the linebackers had to step up today to help the Buckeye defense. That did not happen.

Ohio State ran a scheme that would often put the linebacker in man coverage against the running back. Too often the linebacker would get caught up in traffic, or take a bad angle which would allow Oregon to run for a huge gain.

These linebackers need to get a better idea of what is happening so that they can be in the right spot at the right time. That is a large majority of this game. The tackling in space looked fine for the most part, Ohio State was usually just not in a position to tackle.

This unit is going to have a few weeks where they might be able to get away with fundamentals because of the huge talent gap, but if the Ohio State defense is going to improve, the linebackers need to get back to the fundamentals.