Offensive Line Still Struggling

via www.nfldraftdog.com

Buh-buh-buh-baby you ain't seen nothing yet

The underlying theme of coverage of Saturday's jersey scrimmage has been that while the defense, especially the pass rush, has improved, the line is still struggling mightily to keep the quarterbacks clean. Speaking a little over an hour ago on local sports radio station 97.1 The Fan, Ken Gordon estimated that of the 13 (!) sacks surrendered by the line in the scrimmage,  "only 5 or 6" would have been sacks in a real game. Seven of the aforementioned sacks were by  one guy, sophomore defensive end Solomon Thomas, who wasn't on the radar anywhere last year.

This scares me to death. Last year, our pass rush was lacking for the most part. Thaddeus Gibson showed us some flashes but generally, the line struggled to get after the passer all the way up until the Fiesta Bowl, when Colt McCoy's struggles against the rush had a lot to do with his team's relatively low final score.  Yeah, there was Penn State, but... we both know Penn State was not that good last year, and even slightly above average teams (hello, Ohio State 2007) can get hot in this Big Ten. Nonetheless, McCoy threw for over 400 yards against a Buckeye secondary that has now lost one superstar in Malcolm Jenkins and a serious contributor in Washington. I do not think even a heavily improved pass rush explains away the line's struggles. The fact of the matter is, this line is going to struggle mightily against USC and Penn State. It's an inevitability.

Throughout the course of the offseason, I have slowly let up on Jim Bollman because I still trust Tressel to recognize when change is needed, and that trust has been built on his willingness to make changes after last year's disastrous start offensively. But my patience with Bollman has whittled away to nothingness. This is Ohio State. We have given him the recruits, the facilities, and everything offensive coordinators around the country would die to have, and he's churning this crap out and calling it a solid unit. I held out hope that last year was an outlier, and that Ohio State's line would resume being good enough to not get noticed, rather than so bad that the offensive staff has to game plan around it. Looks like it was pointless. Yeah, it's spring and I shouldn't fret my purty little head. But I can't simply shrug it off and say it isn't unsettling in some way. If the line looks like this come September, it's going to be a long season.