And here we go for week two of the Ohio State football season. The game against Luke Fickell and the Cincinnati Bearcats will no doubt be a step-up in competition, so the effort needs to be better than what we saw after the first quarter against FAU.
As is tradition, we give you five reasons Ohio State will win the game on Saturday at high Noon in Ohio Stadium.
More talent
Look, when you boil it all down, Ohio State has talent and athletic ability the Bearcats can only dream of. That’s not to say Cincinnati can’t hang or doesn’t have enough groceries in the pantry to make life difficult, it’s just to point out which program attracts better athletes.
All things being equal, when it comes down to players making plays and going out on the field and competing, you have to like the chances of the guys Ohio State is running out of the tunnel rather than the ones stepping off the bus for Cincinnati.
I know Bearcat fans don’t want to hear it, but it’s the truth.
The Ohio Stadium advantage
If this game were down at Nippert Stadium in Cincinnati, I’d give the Bearcats a better shot. But here’s the deal, Ohio State has only lost three games at home since 2012. Those three were against Virginia Tech in 2014, Michigan State in 2015, and against Oklahoma in 2017.
Of course it has much more to do with the team that plays in Ohio Stadium than anything else, but at home, it’s clearly harder to beat the Buckeyes than when they go away from the Banks of the Olentangy. Just ask Purdue and Iowa. They enjoyed laying the wood to OSU at their place.
Justin Fields, mobile quarterback
Cincinnati’s defense has been really good over the last couple of seasons. It’ll give the offense multiple looks and try to muck-up the assignments and schemes. So, good thing Ohio State has a mobile quarterback that can keep things alive and move the chains when things break down.
Fields will get rattled on Saturday, but he’ll also make his fair share of explosive plays when everything goes to scramble mode. If there was a pocket passer standing in there trying to dissect everything, I think it would play right into the hands of the Bearcat defense. That’s not the case with Fields and the weapons around him.
Ohio State’s defensive line
Cincinnati will try to sling it around a little bit, but it’d rather get things going on the ground first. The Bearcats won the physical battle against UCLA along the offensive line, but that’ll be harder to do against a team that’s going to be harder to push around in the trenches — especially now that it’s gotten healthier.
There aren’t many more defensive lines better in the country than what Cincinnati will face on Saturday, and that’s going to make things much harder in the ground game. Take away the Bearcats’ bread and butter, and it makes calling defenses against the looks they provide much, much easier.
Ohio State Depth
Man for man, despite there being an advantage for the Buckeyes, it’s not that bad. Cincinnati has the players, drive and scheme to make this thing a contest. However, it’s thin behind that compared to the guys coming off Ryan Day’s bench.
The Buckeyes rotate multiple players in along the defensive line, receiver position, and in the secondary. Things might be close for awhile, but as the game progresses and attrition and conditioning take hold, we should see an Ohio State squad that has energy and purpose still in the tank prevail and pull away.
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