Ohio State’s win over Iowa finally showed us what progress looks like

NCAAF College Football News, Photos, Stats, Scores, Schedule & Videos...

Now look, I am not going to suddenly pretend that I think Iowa is a great football team simply because Ohio State beat the Hawkeyes by 17 points on Saturday.

I have an enormous amount of respect for Kirk Ferentz, Phil Parker, and virtually everything about the Iowa program, but I didn’t believe that this was the 14th-best team in the country coming into the weekend, and I certainly don’t believe it now. The Hawkeyes have struggled mightily to run the ball against Power Four opponents, averaging just 63.3 yards on the ground against Iowa State, Michigan, and Ohio State, and they have now surrendered more than 400 yards in both of their Big Ten outings this season.

Heck, I called them a paper tiger in my prediction for the game, so I am not going to retroactively turn them into the 1985 Bears just to make Ohio State’s 31-14 victory look more impressive.

However, the Buckeyes didn’t need Iowa to be an elite team on Saturday. They needed the Hawkeyes to be a measuring stick, and for the first time this season, I think Ohio State gave us tangible evidence that some of the things we have spent the past month worrying about might actually be getting better.

That was what I wanted from this game more than anything. Earlier in the week, I wrote that there is a difference between believing a football team can improve and actually seeing it. Ohio State didn’t need to look like a finished national championship team in Kinnick Stadium, but after the defensive disaster against Illinois, the inconsistent running game, the lack of production beyond Jeremiah Smith, and the continued inability to generate consistent pressure on defense, we needed proof that identifying those problems was eventually going to lead to fixing them.

Saturday offered proof. Not that Ohio State has arrived at its eventual destination, but that the path it has spent the past month talking about might actually lead somewhere.

The offensive line remains maddening. Julian Sayin was sacked four times, and apparently remembering the snap count became optional at some point during the afternoon. But there were also stretches when the line moved Iowa defenders in ways that we simply haven’t seen consistently enough this season.

Ja’Kobi Jackson ran 14 times for 72 yards and a touchdown, while Bo Jackson added 70 yards on 16 carries. That is 142 yards on 30 attempts — 4.7 yards per carry — against a defense whose ability to stop the run was supposedly one of the most significant challenges Ohio State would face. It wasn’t dominant from beginning to end, but there were stretches when the Buckeyes looked like a team capable of lining up, pushing people around, and getting the yards that were needed. That matters. Obviously, I would like them to do it all the time, but consistency is the final step, not the first one. Before the Buckeyes can make physicality an identity, they first have to prove that they are capable of it in the first place.

So does the fact that Sayin continues to look increasingly comfortable creating with his legs. He is beginning to recognize when the original play is dead and when his athleticism can manufacture something that wasn’t there before. I’d love it if that newfound comfort eventually included a healthy appreciation for getting down and avoiding contact, but it’s about progress, right?

I was also happy to see that he was able to regularly work guys other than Jeremiah Smith into the passing game. Devin McCuin caught four passes for 80 yards and a touchdown, Brandon Inniss made a couple of key catches, and tight ends Nate Roberts and Max LeBlanc got involved.

Of course, Jeremiah Smith was still superhuman — 11 catches, 206 yards, 2 touchdowns, and 2 more Ohio State records broken — but this didn’t feel quite as much like an offense desperately asking Smith and Sayin to drag everyone else across the finish line. There were accomplices this time.

The 10-4 connection was still the center of the offense, but it was nice to see that even with Smith putting up another historic performance, the rest of their playmakers weren’t forgotten about. Arthur Smith’s unit showed that, on the rare occasions when J.J. wasn’t making everyone on the opposing team look silly, there were other answers available.

The same was true defensively. Yes, Iowa’s running game has been far less impressive against competent competition than its early-season numbers suggested. But after Ohio State allowed Illinois to run for 199 yards last week, holding anyone to 39 yards on 21 carries feels meaningful. The defensive line generated pressure and recorded two sacks, including Kenyatta Jackson Jr.’s strip-sack on Iowa’s second play. The linebackers played faster and more aggressively. Jaylen McClain added an interception, and the secondary continued to look like the most dependable unit on the defense.

More encouraging than the numbers themselves was what Ohio State looked like while producing them. There was less hesitation, more aggression, and more defenders arriving where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there. Against Illinois, the defense often looked like 11 players trying to solve the same problem independently; against Iowa, it started to resemble a unit again.

Was everything fixed? Of course not. The pass protection was concerning. Nine penalties are unacceptable, especially when so many were self-inflicted. The linebackers and corners seemed confused in certain coverages at times. And the special teams continue to operate as if they are actively trying to figure out just how many ways one phase can negatively impact an entire football team.

Those things cannot continue at this pace if Ohio State expects to beat the likes of Indiana, Oregon, USC, Michigan, or whoever might be waiting in the postseason.

But that is why I found this game so gratifying. For the first month of this season, conversations about Ohio State have felt binary.

Either the Buckeyes are capable of winning a national championship and therefore should already look like a perfect, polished product, or every problem that appeared in September is treated as evidence that they are ultimately destined to fail.

We, as fans, often have very little patience for the messy middle, even though that is exactly where almost all of a team’s best work is accomplished. The goal is not to avoid that phase, but to embrace it. It’s only then that they can emerge as a more complete team than when they entered.

Saturday offered something considerably more realistic: the possibility that Ohio State can be both very good and very unfinished. Those ideas are not mutually exclusive, no matter how desperately college football discourse — we here at LGHL included — tries to make them so. Ohio State looked like an extraordinarily talented football team that is still figuring things out, but, more importantly, one that finally appears capable of solving many of the problems that have plagued it so far.

That is exactly what this team needed after the collapse at Texas and the uneven performances that followed, and I think it is what the fan base needed too. Not another argument about what Ohio State eventually could become, but evidence that the process of becoming it has actually begun.

Iowa might not have been the test its top-15 ranking suggested, and Saturday certainly didn’t answer every question that will determine whether Ohio State is playing deep into January. But maybe we didn’t need answers to all of them yet; we just needed evidence that answers existed.

For the first month of the season, we have been asked to trust that the offensive line would become more physical, that someone besides Jeremiah Smith would emerge, that the defensive front would create pressure, that the linebackers would settle in, and that all of these individual pieces would eventually start resembling something coherent.

On Saturday, for the first time, we didn’t have to take all of that on faith; we could start to see it with our own eyes.

More at NCAAF College Football News, Photos, Stats, Scores, Schedule & Videos