COLUMBUS, Ohio — Adrift went an offbeat game Saturday night at the Horseshoe, a game that promised some theatrics but delivered mostly small-ball, a game of Notre Dame defensive mastery and Ohio State offensive drudgery, a game that lumbered into the fumes of the third quarter with the Irish ahead by three. Most of the 106,594 spent the evening worrying if not drinking and worrying.
The No. 2 Buckeyes would have to solve this knot of a thing to start recovering from their unspeakable 11-2 season of 2021 and maintain their usual dreams of red confetti in January — but then, wait, suddenly, they did. They went 70 yards in 10 plays, then 95 in 14. They won, 21-10, over the No. 5 Irish, and they looked maybe even the better for it.
True, their gaudy offense had not seemed to enjoy busying itself with obtaining little chunks of yardage, not as much as the 562 yards per game that topped the nation last year. Quarterback C.J. Stroud, fourth in Heisman Trophy balloting last year, did not amass highlights. Their great corps of receivers, always populous and NFL-bound, did not roam the field with the football as accustomed. Jaxon Smith-Njigba, the biggest draw among the pass-catchers these days, left early after two catches, three yards and one hard hit.
The Buckeyes got to halftime with 149 yards, violating several local statutes and ordinances. They got to the five-minute mark of the third quarter still stuck on 184. To get through this particular barbed wire, they had to squeeze out Stroud’s 24-yard touchdown pass to Xavier Johnson with 17 seconds left in the third quarter and Miyan Williams’s two-yard touchdown run with 4:51 left in the game.
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“We just beat the No. 5 team in the country by 11 points,” Ohio State Coach Ryan Day would say, soon adding, “It’s not easy to do,” and noting the related toughness and the fact some had questioned that general toughness. He said, “I think this game is going to pay dividends down the road.”
Maybe the struggle of it can behoove them later on, on some day when things get gnarly in the way they seldom do around here, when somebody provides unexpected trouble.
That’s how it went for a long while Saturday night as two kingdoms that operate in adjacent states brought their famed helmets together for only the seventh time. Ohio State had its 20-year celebration of its 2002 national champions. It had its fans’ expectations of relative ease and imperative glory.
Then the visitor, considered a 17½-point underdog, started sticking its golden helmets into everything. It gave a sense that its new coach, Marcus Freeman, making his regular season debut, had something in mind to flummox the home side for which he used to play linebacker. “We’ve got a good football team,” Freeman said. “We’ve got to learn how to finish, and that’s what I’ve just told the group.” Yet as they started, they did bring pride and joy to the dot of fans in green in a corner of the stadium, just as Oregon fans in green had felt merry here one startling day last September.
That was the day Ohio State’s giant throng started learning its defense would not knock the stuffing out of opposing offenses to the degree the locals would prefer. It gave up 269 rushing yards to Oregon in that loss, and 297 rushing yards to Michigan in a cataclysmic road loss in November, which is not to mention the 203 to Minnesota in a win, or the 226 to Utah in a Rose Bowl win. The program did not enjoy these numbers, so it did what anguished programs do nowadays: paid about $2 million per year for a coordinator.
On the first play of Jim Knowles’s tenure Saturday night, Notre Dame quarterback Tyler Buchner threw short toward the right sideline to Lorenzo Styles, who shirked a hapless charging defender and went loose for 54 yards of prairie. The ball went 15 yards further with a blow-to-the-head penalty on the play, and the locals felt an old little pang.
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The defense cleared it up anyway with tackles from Mike Hall Jr. and Steele Chambers, and Notre Dame got Blake Grupe’s 33-yard field goal. “Maybe last year we would have put our heads down, but we didn’t,” Day said. It made further stout tackles on the next series, especially Lathan Ransom’s third-down thump of tight end Michael Mayer, one yard from a first down. It tackled well all game.
Defense would not become the problem.
No, after breezing 54 yards in four plays with a pass interference mixed in, and with Stroud throwing short to Emeka Egbuka for a 31-yard touchdown trip up the left sideline, the offense stalled. Nothing much would happen until halftime unless you count Noah Ruggles’s missed field goal attempt (39 yards), something that happened only once on 21 occasions last year.
Something had happened, though, with the still-life Notre Dame offense, which suddenly had found things to do across 87 yards of unforeseen driving from late in the first quarter through early in the second. It had gone from dawdling along to running the ball pretty well when, from the Notre Dame 35-yard line, Buchner sent a hopeless third-down pass deep left toward Matt Salerno, who seemed tangled in one-on-one coverage until he reached back for the ball, fell down backward, traced it still, made sure it never hit the ground and caught it for 31 yards. Then the middle opened up as Buchner threw 22 yards to tight end Kevin Bauman.
Soon the Irish were in the end zone on Audric Estime’s one-yard leap, and $2 million for a coordinator could seem steep to those who judge things with haste (or, in other word, fans). Then, it didn’t. Notre Dame would spend the second half grinding and grunting for 72 yards after 181 in the first.
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“We’ve got a lot to prove,” Ransom said.
“The story of the night was the defense,” Day said.
The harder part of the night was the offense, and five straight possessions through the middle of the game (not including a half-ending kneel down) revealed four punts and the missed field goal. The stadium started to take on that soundless sound of mass fret.
Then as the third quarter waned and the Buckeyes threatened, still down 10-7, a chop-block call seemed to stall them. They faced a third and 11 from the Notre Dame 24-yard line. From the great stash of players Egbuke calls “the best wide receiver room in America” came the unheralded Johnson, a graduate former walk-on and special teams type who suddenly made a first-rate cut toward the middle and fielded Stroud’s pass in the middle of the end zone. He then made the tackle on the ensuing kickoff.
It seemed to wake the joint, and seemed to loosen the offense, which spent 14 plays and seven minutes traveling its 95 yards for the clincher. It left the coach saying, “If we’re able to win like this, and we can win different ways, then that’s going to help us down the road.”
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