What some here do not seem to understand is what happens when two teams with nominally equal talent play, and one works harder, is better conditioned, is more relentless, and just wants it more, and when that team is winning the battle in the trenches. What you see is exactly what this game looked like. I've seen it a hundred times. This season alone we saw it tonight, and we saw it against Penn State. The teams play close in the first quarter, fairly close in the first half of the second quarter, but the better team begins to assert dominance in the last half of the second quarter. Then, along comes half time, and the worse team gets a chance to re-group, and they come out, and play tough in the beginning of the third quarter, but they can't sustain it. Somewhere in the middle of the third quarter the wheels fall off, and the game that seemed close becomes lopsided.
You can think of it like a boxing match. One fighter keeps going to the body. At first it doesn't seem to be doing any good, but over time, it takes a toll. Ohio's offensive and defensive lines were dominant, and they took a toll on EMU. EMU was guilty of a lot of penalties on the offensive line side, trying to stop Ohio, and on the defensive side, they had no sacks at all. But that's just the visible signs. If you were on the field, you probably would have heard them sucking wind as the game went on.
EMU has talent that isn't that much different from Ohio. They don't have the coaching, the conditioning, or the relentlessness. Therefore the longer the game went on, the more apparent those differences became.
As for saying "without the long runs" or "without the runs late in the game", why not say "without the few that got stuffed, they averaged over 9 yards, or "except for the first quarter...". If you are going to compare one game to another, you compare 60 minutes. Both games are the same length. Both games have a part where the teams are fresh, and a part where they are worn down. Even if you want to play that game, look at Beau. Most of the people in the chat felt Boykin was running better, even before Boykin's long run. Beau had no runs at the end, and no long runs. He still averaged 6.5 yards a carry, a great game.
However you slice it, this was the best rushing game for Ohio in quite some time. Were the Bobcats perfect? No, they had 2 turnovers, and they had a few dropped passes, and some plays where the didn't contain well, and some plays where they didn't tackle well. They can learn from those. But, on the whole, Ohio dominated at the point of attack all night, and the team that does that is going to win 99% of the time. Those that always watch the ball might miss that dominance, but it was there. You can see it in the fact that Ohio had a lot of sacks, and flushed their QB out of the pocket even more often, and the fact that Ohio didn't give up any sacks. You can see it in large average total yards per rush. You can see it in the number of times Ohio disrupted their runs before they got started. Yes, EMU had a number of runs that broke contain and went for good chunks, but for the entire game they only averaged 3.5 yards a carry, not good at all. The runs might have seemed bigger than that because they Ohio defense was moving the EMU offensive line backwards. On the other side of the ball, if you look at EMU's defensive stats, I'm sure you'll probably find an unusually high percentage of tackles made by DBs, because the EMU line was pancaked or moved out of the way. Maybe a game won by domination at the point of attack isn't your cup of tea, but it does happen to be mine, and I enjoyed this game a lot.
Last Edited: 11/2/2012 4:10:32 AM by L.C.