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Brutally Honest To-Do List: What Ohio State needs to do in today’s Tulsa game

I think that we can all agree on this one.

Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch via Imagn Content Services, LLC
Matt Tamanini Matt Tamanini is the co-managing editor of Land-Grant Holy Land having joined the site in 2016.

Look, I’m going to keep this one short, because we’ve been through Ohio State’s issues ad nauseam this week (as you will see in the links below), and honestly, I don’t have the energy or the wherewithal to recite them again (but I probably will anyway). Not to mention that for some reason, the Ohio State coaching staff completely ignored practically every item on my to-do list for the Oregon game, and we see where that got them.

The Buckeyes will take on a struggling Tulsa Golden Hurricane team (0-2) today at 3:30 on FS1, and they need to make good use of this opportunity. While Tulsa has lost to an FCS team this season, they aren’t completely incompetent (they made the AAC Championship Game against Cincinnati last season) and they are well-coached, so they will be able to show and do a few things to challenge OSU.

But as we all know, Ohio State’s issues this season haven’t really been of their opponents’ making, they have been nearly completely self-inflicted at this point. So that brings me to the single, solitary item on this week’s Brutally Honest To-Do List:


1) Don’t suck

This goes for coaches, players, coordinators, heck, even fans, because frankly, there’s been plenty of sucking to go around through the first two games of the season. Now In fairness, there’s been a lot more non-sucking than people seem willing to acknowledge, but the level of suckatude has been unacceptable be every established Ohio State measure thus far in 2021.

Whether that’s players flagrantly ill-prepared for their defensive assignments; play-callers not seeming to know how to best leverage the specific talents of their players; position-coaches trying to rotate in every player in their room so as to avoid receiving angry emails from players’ parents; fans having temper-tantrums when a player nearly sets an all-time school record, but still isn’t perfect; players (allegedly) selling proprietary team secrets to fledgling Ohio State blogs; there has been so much sucking so far this season that it is painful. Hell, we’ve chronicled every angle of the sucking here at LGHL over the past week:

Now, let’s be honest, even discounting the young 2021 college football season, most of 2020 and 2021 has sucked on it’s own; so honestly, I’m just not here for the Buckeyes sucking too. Ain’t nobody got time for that. We’ve had enough despair and disappointment over the past year and a half, we don’t need more from the Scarlet and Gray.

So it’s time for the Buckeye staff to get over themselves and their stubborn pride and make the decisions that best put their players in positions to be successful. It’s time for the players to focus on their fundamentals and their freakish athleticism and just make plays. It’s time for the coaches to pare down their rotations and just get the best players on the field. It’s time for the head coach to learn some lessons from his early-career hiring mistakes. It’s time for fans to continue to be passionate, but to develop some perspective (this might be the most difficult of all). And most importantly, it’s time for Ohio State to stop sucking.