Here are a list of things that everyone who has played college football on a video game system in the last five years knows about calling plays on offense, but apparently Ohio State offensive coordinator Jim Bollman does not.
- You run the ball to set up the play-action pass. A creative mix of run plays and play-action pass plays keeps the defense off guard. By alternating the focus of the secondary, and especially the linebackers, from the line of scrimmage to their coverage responsibilities, you can keep them off balance and open up running lanes or allow receivers to get open behind the coverage. When you run the ball over and over, the offense is predictable. When you run play-action passes over and over, the entire point of the play is rendered useless as there is no deception or threat of the run involved. Jim Bollman apparently is not aware of either of these things.
- You pass the ball to set up the draw play. The perfect time to call a draw play is when you are gashing the defense through the air passing the ball. With the defense focused on pass coverage and the defensive line focused on getting to the quarterback for a sack, surprising them with a draw play up the middle catches them off guard and hopefully results in some yardage. At the very least, it keeps the pass rush honest and keeps the linebackers and secondary guessing about whether they should be in coverage or defending the run. Once again, all of this works only if the offense is having success passing the ball and the defenders are worried about their coverage responsibilities. Without an effective passing game, draw plays are beyond useless and even detrimental to the offense. They take time to development and with no pass game to worry about, slow developing run plays are even easier for a defense to stop. Jim Bollman apparently does not know this after running more draw plays than completing passes against Michigan State.
- When the defense is blitzing, running slow-developing pass patterns 20 yards down field all night is probably a bad idea. With a true freshman quarterback, running slow-developing pass patterns 20 yards down field all night is probably a bad idea. With an extremely young and inexperienced group of wide receivers, running slow-developing pass patterns 20 yards down field all night is probably a bad idea. There was absolutely no attempt made by Jim Bollman and the offensive coaching staff to make things easy for Braxton Miller and the young group of receivers. Even if we forget for a second that the Spartans were blitzing on every single play, it might have been a good idea to put in some simple passing plays to get Miller and his receivers comfortable and the offense some easy yards. With a young QB, young WRs, and a blitzing defense, running slow-developing 20 yard pass patterns the entire night with no adjustments was borderline criminal, and that is exactly what Jim Bollman did.
- When the defense is blitzing and you have a freshman quarterback, running play-action draw plays on third and long is also idiotic and borderline criminal. On top of everything else I mentioned in the last bullet point, this was the worst offense of the night by Jim Bollman by far. Stick with me here because this will take awhile to get through. The defense is blitzing, we know this because they have been on every play all night long. The quarterback hasn’t had time in the pocket all night because of the constant blitzing. You are running 20 yard pass patterns (which is almost justified in this instance since it is third and long) which take a long time to develop, compounding the limited time the QB has to throw due to the blitz. The draw play hasn’t been working all night and the defense is not fooled or scared by the draw play even a little bit.Everyone in the world knows that you are throwing the ball either way. Who in their right mind thinks that running a play-action fake draw on third and long under these circumstances is a good idea? Jim Bollman does. Here is why this play is so incredibly stupid: It gives your struggling quarterback even less time to look downfield and find the open receivers as they carry out the play fake, it takes away the RB as an extra blocker on the edge to pick up the blitz, and finally, it takes forever to develop, which compounds the issue of the 20 yard pass patterns also taking forever to develop… have we mentioned that we KNOW the defense is blitzing? It couldn’t have been a worse play call on third and long, and Jim Bollman made it on multiple occasions against the Spartans.
- Braxton Miller and Joe Bauserman are not the same quarterback and therefore you should not be running the same plays to utilize their strengths. Ignoring for a moment that we have already discovered Joe Bauserman’s extremely limited strengths and that he was on the field in the first place, why in the hell are we running the same offense under both QBs? Is Jim Bollman too lazy or stupid to come up with two different play books to utilize the strengths of each of his quarterbacks? If for some inexcusable reason he only prepared one playbook designed for Miller for the game (which is a stretch given everything listed in the bullet points above), who thought it was a good idea to put Bauserman in the game running Braxton Miller’s (ill-conceived in the first place) plays? Apparently Jim Bollman did.
- When you have a highly skilled runner at QB and another highly unskilled-at-pretty-much-everything QB, you should probably roll the former out of the pocket and not the latter. Jim Bollman didn’t roll the QB out of the pocket (by design) until he had inexplicably put Bauserman in the game, who proceeded to get sacked.Genius!
- Continuing to do all of these things throughout the entire game with absolutely no adjustments is flat out insane and the worst thing of all. When you come up with a dud of an offensive game plan (which can happen from time to time, particularly against good defensive coordinators), at the very least you can attempt to make adjustments on the fly to exploit what the defense is doing (quick passes and screens to counter the blitz, perhaps?). Jim Bollman is apparently utterly incapable of doing either of these things.
Against the Spartans, Jim Bollman proved that for the last decade Jim Tressel and some unbelievable talent (Troy Smith and some first round players at receiver in ’05 and ’06, Beanie Wells in ’07 and ’08, Terrelle Pryor for the last three seasons) acted as a buffer between him and his idiocy and incompetence preparing game plans and calling plays for the offense.
There was no plan, there was no rhythm, there was no coherence, there was no logic, and worse of all by far, there were no adjustments during the game against Michigan State.
Good coordinators at elite college football programs get hired as head coaches sooner rather than later. There is a reason that Jim Bollman has been Tressel’s offensive coordinator since their days together at YSU.
Out of everything in the extremely complicated and mixed legacy that Jim Tressel left at Ohio State, Jim Bollman may be the most damaging legacy by far.
Ohio State’s talent on offense (and 9 of 12 teams in the B10 would kill for similar talent, no matter how young) is being dealt an extreme disservice by Jim Bollman’s continued incompetence.
Luke Fickell, Buckeye Nation, and worst all the players are paying the price for Jim Tressel’s incomprehensible loyalty to his utterly incompetent offensive coordinator over the past decade.
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