Ohio State Football: Confidence level against Michigan State

Coaching Staff Confidence Level

The Ohio State football team has the more experienced coaching staff in this game. When a team comes into Columbus with an interim head coach, it should automatically be an advantage to Ohio State, and this is the case this week.

Ryan Day has never lost to Michigan State. In the three games he has coached against Sparty, Day’s average win has been by 34 points. In all three of those games, Day had an offense that was clicking on all cylinders, especially in the passing game. This season, the offense hasn’t been nearly as high-flying as past Day-led teams.

Despite the drop in offensive production, it has been impressive nonetheless that Day has remained just as effective in the win column, going 9-0 in all nine games this season. The ability to adapt a coaching style, philosophy, or playbook in and around the talent that a coach has is a sign of a really good coach. It’s obvious that Day would rather be scoring in the 50s every week, but when you have a defense as suffocating as he has this season, it only makes sense to make the offense complementary to that team strength.

That doesn’t mean that the offense can’t come alive here at the end of the season, but it has become apparent that Day has settled with making the run game his main objective every week, especially since the return of TreVeyon Henderson to the lineup.

I’m sure that the Michigan State defensive staff will have a similar game plan to that of Greg Schiano and Rutgers from a week ago, that stymied the Buckeye offense for a half. But in the end, much like Rutgers, Sparty just doesn’t have the horses to stop this Ohio State team.

For only the third time this season, my confidence level in this coaching staff when compared to the coaching staff of the opponent is at a 10. The last time I was this confident in our coaching staff was against Western Kentucky all the way game back in game three.