Three reasons the Ohio State football team will win a National Championship
By Ryan Stano
2. The Ohio State football team has a good defense.
Coming into this season, we didn’t expect the Buckeyes to have a good defense. We were hoping for just average after they had been extremely poor in 2021 and pretty bad in the secondary in 2020. What a difference a year, and a big-time hire, make.
Jim Knowles has done wonders with the defense. He has transformed this unit from being below-average to actually really good. The Buckeyes rank 11th in yards per play, giving up only 4.47. They are also 7th in total yards per game, giving up just 253.5.
What Knowles has done has completely transformed what the ceiling is for this team. Instead of the defense being deadweight and holding this team back, they are a strength. They’re obviously not as good as the offense is, but no one is. That’s not a slight.
Through six games, the Buckeyes have only given up 11 touchdowns. In fact, the defense has only given up two touchdowns in the fourth quarter all season, and that was when all of the backups were already out there. The starters haven’t budged late in games.
If this is how the defense is going to play all year, other teams don’t have a chance. The only way they can beat the Buckeyes is if they hurt themselves. So far, they haven’t done that either. That leads me to my last reason they will win it all.