Ohio State Football: Big Ten teams won’t like OSU’s defense

The Ohio State football team will have a new defensive scheme debuting this season. It’s a 4-2-5 that will have a lot of moving parts. It’s meant to dictate what the offense can do instead of the other way around. That is if it’s run properly and correctly.

As long as the Buckeyes don’t think the defense is too complicated, they should cause issues for opponents. Big Ten teams in particular won’t like what the Buckeyes are doing. They aren’t used to a defense like this and won’t know how to properly attack it the first time they see it.

Jim Knowles is very creative in how he runs the defense. He will be more apt to blitz and will do so with different players from different positions. The offense won’t know where the Ohio State football team is coming from. This should help increase the number of sacks they get.

The Buckeyes aren’t just looking to confuse Big Ten teams though. They are looking to dictate the pace of the game to every opponent they face. Knowles took an Oklahoma State team that had a bad defense and turned them into a top-five defense in the country.

While Ohio State fans shouldn’t expect Knowles to turn the Buckeyes’ defense into a top-five caliber defense right away, they should still be much improved from a year ago. That’s all this team needs with how good the offense is going to be in order to be a contender.

We won’t find out the true effectiveness of the defense for another six months, so we’ll just have to wait and see. It’s something that has excited me more than other preseason storylines in the past.