Ohio State Buckeyes vs Minnesota Golden Gophers - Preview & Prediction - College Football 2021

[Music] college football nerds here talking ohio state in minnesota we are talking 2021 football and we're not talking realignment or any preseason previews this is a game preview and we're excited about it we're glad y'all are here two things of note one as always in the comments after you're sure that you've hit subscribe liked and the notification bell in those comments give us your score prediction and we will mix it up with you tell you why you're wrong you can tell us while we're wrong i think minnesota fans are going to remind us that we missed that auburn pick a couple years ago so uh we'll take the l we're happy to um and then another thing we are doing a live show 10 p.m eastern on game day uh september 4th saturday during all the action so we'll have a lot to talk about that's already happened and some things that are still going on it'll be a lot of fun our live shows are really great um and just a lot of fun so um and there's two of us so one of us can man the chat and one of us can talk it'll be fun all right josh so we always struggle in these early season games because we're nerds we like to talk numbers we have a computer model that comes in week four um but there's a kind of an interesting note that you were when you were doing a little prep for this in terms of comparative defenses in this game between ohio state and minnesota and and i want you to touch on that um because to me it brings about some questions about the point spread in this game that i think are worth noting but just just kind of get us into sort of those statistics that you found about these two defenses as a way to kick this one off when you look at the overall season statistics for ohio state and minnesota last year that not that dissimilar i mean ohio state in terms of total offense in the big ten was first in the conference minnesota was fifth if you looked at total defense in the yard per play basis ohio state was 11th minnesota was 14th so that doesn't sound all that different i think the rub though is when you start looking at the numbers in the gap that they presented so again first to fifth ohio state versus minnesota on offense what does that mean it was actually about a two yard per play differential the gap between ohio state and minnesota one to five was larger than the gap between minnesota and rutgers who was 14th and the same thing shows up on the defensive side of the ball ohio state did not have a top-end defense last year and i think most ohio state fans understand that 11th in the conference 5.85 yards per play allowed that's not really a great number you usually want to see that more around five but 5.85 you know is is bad minnesota was 6.9 yards per play on the year almost seven yards of snap surrendered to their opponents and to put that in perspective the gap between number two northwestern defensively was 4.86 yards per play in ohio state was about a yard 4.86 5.85 the gap between ohio state and minnesota was larger than that so minnesota wasn't just bad defensively they were bad almost by an order of magnitude illinois and minnesota in particular and the real cause of that was the rush defense now ohio state struggled and passed defense throughout the year they had issues they had um you know like a lot of depth problems at corner that showed up i don't think sean wade was ever really should have been a primary corner for that defense maybe he wanted to be but he really shouldn't have been his role um but they didn't really have an issue with run defense ohio state allowed 3.35 yards per carry 3.3 yards per carry is a great number that's a very solid run defense that was third excuse me tied for second in the big ten actually tied with wisconsin minnesota was 14th um and they weren't just 14th they were 14th at 6.3 yards per carry that's abysmal frankly about double the amount that ohio state was giving up and that's why minnesota ended up having a rough year it's why minnesota lost badly to michigan early in the years why they had struggled really in all their games be it iowa maryland really the only teams they stopped right at the end of the year nebraska you can kind of set aside because you know i forced myself to watch that game saturday and wished i didn't against illinois but nebraska is what they are at this point in wisconsin whose offense was really really putrid so i think it's kind of amazing that minnesota finished where they did given they didn't play ohio state they didn't play indiana they didn't play penn state who yeah they were not a great team but it's because the defense wasn't doing well the offense was very highly rated none of those teams played minnesota and minnesota still ended up with a really really hard defensive statistics so going into this game the biggest takeaway i have is that minnesota has a long way to go to improve enough defensively to really make this a contest yeah and right now you know the the point spread is floating around 13 and a half and 14 points and um i i'm gonna unpack some of it and i want you to unpack some of it as well for me i think that um i think it's a little off to be honest because if you look at the defenses from last year your point the last point you made was a huge one like ohio state was still better with a much tougher schedule against much more infinitely more explosive offenses i'm willing to give a little bit of a mulligan because it was a coveted year because if we take two steps back that minnesota 2019 offense was excellent um it really was and part of me is saying okay why is this a 14 point spread on paper and not even more um and maybe it's because tanner morgan's coming back and cj tr stroud is in his first start so quarterback's a huge component in this but i also think in the back of my mind this ohio state defense what for what they lack in raw statistics towards the the back half of that season they caught fire in terms of explosive defensive line play and that is a great neutralizer when you have a good quarterback on the other side of the ball and i think tanner morgan's really good um i i think that ohio state even without some of these guys uh in the national championship game bottled up alabama's run game pretty well considering the fact that the passing game was putting a lot of stress on that defense so abraham who i think is a really really good running back and i can't wait to watch in this game i like i don't know that he's going to be that effective against this what i think is really impressive defensive line so for me i'm leaning in the camp of this is going to be more than a 14-point win for iowa state but i want you to kind of bring me back to the middle and give me some reasons why i should think that maybe not only is should it be 14 but maybe even less i think the first thing to note is that minnesota is a very senior laden team you've got senior quarterbacks senior running backs senior receivers senior multiple senior offensive linemen and a ton of seniors on defense so there's reason to believe that minnesota and their seniority is going to be a really scrappy team and that they may benefit from you know spring and fall camp to more round into form the other thing and i think this may be where the vegas line is coming from is that minnesota has a lot of transfer players that are been injected depth into the defensive side of the ball for example niles pinkney has been a really productive defensive lineman for clemson that we've talked about at length on our show talking about clemson games for years and now he's going to be playing for minnesota that given how bad they were defensively and run defense it's going to be an almost immediate upgrade i mean he's a high level defensive tackle i don't know that he's you know he's not murphy or brzee the problem he had was he's behind two you know probably two first-round draft picks a defensive tackle at clemson but he's an nfl caliber defensive lineman he will be drafted more than likely and there are a bunch of guys like that on the defensive unit and for people like us it's hard to say what that's going to look like even beat writers can talk about guys are playing well it doesn't mean much in camp but until we actually see them play a game we don't know so i will say minnesota's defense in particular probably one of the more uncertain units and even when we talk about last year's games right i feel like the pac-12 and the big ten because their situation was really inconsistent and they didn't play very many games the teams they play didn't play many other games and just getting a grasp of what any of it meant was really hard or worthless we talked about that a lot with like oregon and iowa state you know oregon lost to iowa state in the bowl game minus four in the turnover margin and they played half as many games as iowa state what the heck do you do with that uh and i think that's a little bit the same thing when you try to compare minnesota with the few games they played versus ohio state that we at least have those playoff data points uh but i think that's where it comes from is those angles the fact that there's so much seniority the offensive side of the ball wasn't super productive they really didn't have consistent receiving play throughout the core especially when bateman opted out but you know there's a lot of key components there that make you think this could be a salty team and i think maybe vegas sees that happening but i'll i'll go ahead and i guess sort of turn that back around to to make my ultimate point i don't necessarily see that being enough given what ohio state has to work with in terms of talent because they do have awesome recruiting classes especially under day and i think they're going to be able to line some guys up and really play football and minnesota has a huge hill to climb to keep a two-score game with an ohio state team that you know i mean you think 13 points sounds like a pretty reasonable spread it's a large spread right how many teams stayed within 14 points of ohio state last year i mean penn state closed the gap to 13 at the end of the game um wreckers certainly didn't indiana was a seven point game michigan state they ran out of the stadium northwestern about two touchdowns clemson they beat by more than that so i mean 14 points really isn't a lot when you talk about these top five elite teams they're more than capable of covering those kinds of spreads and do it really frequently yeah and just real quick to put it bluntly to stay within 14 points of iowa state right now you probably need to be a top 10 team right in most cases yeah i mean maybe you backdoor cover it but to legitimately stay with two touchdowns in a predictable way like it happens people have down games but i'm talking about when you bet on a game you're really betting the average game which is going to happen like three or four out of five times the average game for most teams you probably need to be a top 10 team to be able to stay with two too tight within two touchdowns in a reliable basis and what i really think is really two things like like you said vegas is kind of banking on probably some first game ugliness from both of these teams which introduces randomness which is hard like the randomness can keep a dominant team really from getting a good foothold and getting in a groove um and the transfer players may be a big thing sometimes they don't always pan out but the other thing they're they are probably looking at is that it's stroud's first game and look we caught some heat from ohio state fans in our top 10 ranking and we do it we did a top 10 kind of a preseason top 10 video out there and a top 10 coaches video that was actually a really interesting watch um we have ryan day really high y'all would like it um but i'm kind of standing my ground on this one um right now right now not into the year not into the playoffs um but first game for you to not think that you're gonna have a little bit of drop off offensively after you lose a dude at running back and we saw that drop off in the alabama game right and then you've got stroud's first start versus justin fields final season la final start there's going to be a drop off offensively there has to be i don't care how deep and it is very deep your wide receiver room is um so there's some of that at play but i think the overall just ohio stateness y'all can uh you know kind of quote me on that that's a new thing that we're going to work out with ohio stateness that they have just in aggregate is so much greater than some of individual parts especially when they can kind of like we talk about with alabama and clemson sort of bow constrictor you a little bit to making your own mistakes i see that as a situation where um at a sum total i just don't see this being that close but um i want you to talk a little bit about how much how much getting ohio state in week one is a big deal or is it not a big deal in your opinion for minnesota is that the opportunity that they have to even maybe win the game or keep it close is because they're getting them in week one and not week seven i do think it's a big factor you know ohio state has a lot of turnover i think turnover is tough at the linebacker position for a team it's also tough at the quarterback position for a team it just is in college football um i've heard the statistic people talk about offensive line reps and that was from a few years ago that got really hot but it's the statistical correlation for offensive line starts and winning really actually isn't that high the largest correlation by the way is actually secondary play uh experience secondaries are a lot better than novice secondaries which if you think back i think you'll realize that happens quite a bit but i don't know where ohio state's going to be early in the season i mean when you look at like the running back room i think master teague is a solid back but i think he's a good number two back i don't know that he's a top five team lead back i don't think he's an nfl starter tailback i think he'll make a roster but i don't think he's an nfl starter um and ohio state's used to having guys like jk dobbins and i think trayvon henderson may be a guy like that legitimately but in game one i can't see them putting out trayvon henderson having never seen him you know man up and block a guy in a live game and expose a quarterback like that i i he's gonna almost certainly in my mind end up have playing a reserve role unless he just absolutely wows them and is all all-around understanding of the game and the playbook it's very likely going to be a supplemental role the end of the year may be a different story and in the same way you talked about cj stroud i mean when i watched the spring game the thing that jumped out for me with stroud is one his athleticism is really high but two he was really comfortable when he could step into the pocket and really drive his throws down to a guy in front of him he was a lot less comfortable dealing with space in the passing game and what i mean by that is throwing over second level defenders he really struggled in that game and that's the only past attempts i really have to go by from him and that's i think maybe a skill that's going to take a little bit of time from him he was a little danced around in the pocket a little bit i think that'll come down i don't know how much my take from one game as a non-quarterback coach really means for anything but i i don't think cj stroud at the beginning of the year is going to be the same guy he is at the end of the year i think what you're going to see from ohio state is trying to use stroud's athleticism a little bit trying to run the ball a lot letig in the stable of running backs and trying to throw a lot of screens and a lot of passes five you know either behind the line of scrimmage or within certainly within 10 yards to the receivers and try to let them make a play and move it downfield i don't think you're going to see a ton of explosiveness i don't think you're going to see the explosive freshman running back a ton or at least not as a lead back early i don't think you're going to see a ton of deep shots like you'd like to because fields was really really good at those and they they pulled them out a lot just throwing daggers at teams early in this game so i do think if you when you get ohio state later in the year i think they're going to be a much tougher route i think all the talent that they have is going to really start to gel and i think on the offensive side of the ball they're going to start to use a little bit of a different tool bag of weapons than they they will early in the season i think this is going to look a lot more like a jt barrett ohio state team early and it's going to look a little bit more like the justin fields team quite possibly late uh but quite frankly i don't think we're gonna really know what that looks like until later because none of the ohio state quarterbacks have ever thrown a pass so i don't really know what they look like when the bullets are flying all right so i think it's prediction time for me um and people need to understand that preseason predictions are tough they're tough for us especially because we are numbers driven and that require and that's why we don't have a computer model until week four because we feel like responsible to speak to what the numbers say and so that makes this really hard and this is i'll do a sidebar on this this is why we're not doing a wisconsin penn state preview it's one of the biggest games of the week we probably do a lot of views but we couldn't do that game justice because there's so many question marks about those two teams and we aren't educated enough on those two teams to speak to them and we just throw a bunch of generic bs out there and that's just not what we do so this is tough for me um i do think that that ohio state is just better they're just more talented and i think the jt barrett versus justin fields comparison is a really good one in terms of contextualizing this game and what we said about jt barrett in a lot of those ohio state offenses was they're gonna murder everybody until they play a top five team on pure athleticism and talent gap alone and i think that's where we are with ohio state um minnesota's got a lot of talented transfers that haven't really played together yet um so give me ohio state 37 minnesota 20. which is a cover um but maybe not as big of a blowout as i thought before we started talking so give me yours i'm going to go ohio state 4217 so a bigger one and that really is based off the fact that i think when ohio state gets up in this game the depth differential i think is going to cause them to kind of run away with it and i'll add one note on this people that have followed us for a long time and i'm gonna make some minnesota fans some angry some less angry no i was never high on two particular hires that was taggart and fleck when they first got hired and my big soap box with those two is neither one had significant p5 coordinator or higher level experience they had a couple little experiences as an assistant coach but that was about it um i i don't know how well they're equipped to run a program long term fleck has a very particular style and i think it can work with certain kids in a certain environment especially when they're being successful i think it can work very well but i think what we saw last year is it can also struggle a little bit if they're not being successful and i think we're gonna know really early this year what kind of minnesota team we're gonna get um and i think this game you know more than just how like telling how good minnesota is or isn't is going to be a really big deal for minnesota because if they get blown out and then they have a couple other rough games i think things could spiral a little bit frankly for minnesota um and i think the most important thing for minnesota it'd be great if you could beat ohio state but minnesota needs to come out and look like they belong on the field and they need to fight for four quarters and stay in this game and even if they're losing by 25 points you know a backdoor cover where they score a couple late touchdowns and stay in it i think is really important for the culture that they're trying to build right now because i just call it my like weird gut maybe i'm totally wrong but i feel like where they were at last year and it's probably the same way this year is right on the precipice of flex high energy style um like holding on to the team that really wants to fight with him or having a team that's struggling badly enough that they just say like all right whatever man like we're not gonna win you know it's fine like that high energy guys like that um need a certain level of success to get buy in uh because when you don't get it it's hard for kids to be excited about being on a team where they're losing by 30 points yeah and i think what you said even a backdoor cover um just competitive in this game would speak to one a renewed and improved ability as a team versus what they wish they showed last year and two um yeah it would help with buy-in there so all right let us know in the comments what you think about this game and how it's gonna shape up and don't forget live show 10 p.m eastern september 4th we will see all y'all there and if we're right or wrong especially if we're wrong you can get in there and let us know about it thanks so much y'all have a great week and god bless [Music]

Channel: College Football Nerds

Views: 25,230

Keywords: Ohio state vs minnesota, osu vs minnesota, minnesota football, tanner morgan, cj stroud, hype, preview, prediction, highlights, college football, ohio state football, season, 2021, espn, fox, big 10, b1g, big ten, ibrahim, garret wilson, chris olave, playoffs

Id: StR2EtAmPX8

Length: 21min 56sec (1316 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021