Ohio State football vs. Wisconsin: Defensive grades

The Ohio State football team won their first game against a Big Ten opponent by beating Wisconsin 52-21. It was a game that wasn’t close and it was only the second time this season that the Buckeyes covered the spread. Here are the grades for the defensive units.

When you see the box score, you’d think that the Badgers killed Ohio State on the ground all game. Wisconsin had 192 yards rushing. But 75 of that came on one play late in the game when the score was already decided. The defensive line did a pretty good job bottling up Braelon Allen for most of the game.

Jack Sawyer got the only Ohio State sack of the game as well. The Buckeyes haven’t done a great job of being able to get to the quarterback so far this season, so that’s something to watch from here on out. We’ll see if they can get that fixed.

Tommy Eichenberg was all over the field once again in this one, recording 14 tackles and 2 tackles for loss. He was the leading tackler for the Ohio State football team. Steele Chambers added 6 more tackles too. These two guys have played really well all season long and they did again Saturday night.

Before the game, we found out that the Buckeyes were going to be without both Denzel Burke and Cam Brown. Jordan Hancock was still out too. That meant they were missing their top three cornerbacks. And yet, they only allowed just 104 yards passing.

Jyaire Brown and JK Johnson were the starting cornerbacks and they couldn’t have played any better. Tanner McCalister had an early interception that led to a Buckeye touchdown. It’s interesting that the Buckeyes played their best game in the secondary when they didn’t have all of those guys on the field.

It was a great defensive effort and a really good win to get for the Buckeyes. Jim Knowles has done wonders with this group already.