Tressel Talk – Week 8
Right: Senator Sweater Vest, minus the vest, spoke on Tuesday.
AP Photo
It’s that time of the week when we crash Senator Sweater Vest’s weekly press conference at the Blue Danube on North High St.
This week’s episode was the longest of the season. Clearly, there are a lot of questions concerning The Ohio State University’s varsity tackle football squad, particularly on offense.
The Buckeyes will face their third ranked team of the year and will have a stern test this Saturday against Michigan State. This has become Ohio State’s toughest two-week stretch of the season. Following the match-up against the Spartans, the Bucks’ return home to square off against Penn State.
Defensively, Ohio State has played well for the most part, especially against more pass-oriented teams, but this week the Spartans feature a very good running game with Javon Ringer. Obviously, the offense must improve this week if the Buckeyes plan on leaving East Lansing with a “W.”
In Coach Tressel’s opening statements. he normally names the top players from each unit for the previous game. This week, no offensive players were mentioned.
Senior cornerback Malcolm Jenkins was the Defensive Player of the Game after totaling four tackles, an interception, a pass break-up and a blocked punt.
During his opening statements, Coach T. talked about his struggling offense against Purdue:
Probably the poorest thing we did on offense was our lack of consistency and it showed in our grades. We didn’t have anyone grade a winning performance, therefore there must have been enough errors by guys through the course of the time that you were going to have a hard time putting together a string of first downs.”
Later, when Coach Tressel opens the floor for questions, the first one asked why the Buckeyes are having so much difficulty scoring touchdowns with nine starters that returned from a year ago?
Well, we’re not — I hate to say it, we’re not executing. I wish there were something different than that. Whether it be we didn’t — I don’t want to use the word guess, but we didn’t plan for the right look that they were going to be in on first and goal at the nine or we didn’t execute the play we had designed with all 11 guys.”
Later, he was asked if Terrelle has progressed the way he wanted him to and how Pryor fared last Saturday:
Well, he didn’t grade a winning performance, but I thought he progressed. Like I told him just yesterday we were sitting and talking that the number one quality that Troy Smith brought to our team was he was tremendously careful with the football, and as he grew into understanding the whole game, he became lethal for the opponents, but it started from the right foundation. And knock on wood, Terrelle’s done a pretty good job from that standpoint. I think he has grown in his understanding, and I think he’ll do nothing but progress.”
Coach Tressel then elaborated on Pryor:
I think right now, in his progression, he’s probably waiting until he’s 90 percent sure, and I’d rather that than he wait until he’s 60 percent sure, then he’d look like all those guys on TV that every time you turn on the highlights, someone’s running the other way with an interception, whether it’s us watching our film against Michigan State or you turn on the weekend highlights and you say, oh, yeah, Johnny threw for 320, but they had three of them that went this way. So I’d rather have him that way than, oh, it’s time to get rid of it.”
