Here’s Where We Worry About Ohio State

Ohio State won again last Saturday, extending college football’s longest winning streak to 18 games. As they approach the midway point of the regular season, the defending national champs are exactly where the preseason consensus thought they’d be: 5-0 overall, 1-0 in Big Ten play, and sitting atop both major polls by substantial margins. The Buckeyes have yet to lose a starter to long-term injury or to trail in the fourth quarter of any game. In every way that matters, they remain on track to fulfill their destiny as the best team in the nation for the second year in a row. In so many other ways, it’s becoming harder and harder to shake the sinking feeling that something about the no. 1 team is … off. Certainly it wasn’t expected to struggle to this extent against the early-season filler. Relative to what we saw from essentially the same lineup at the end of last year’s title run, the Buckeyes who showed up for Saturday’s down-to-the-wire, 34-27 escape at Indiana looked sloppy, underwhelming, and vulnerable. Two weeks earlier, the offense sleepwalked through an equally distressing, 20-13 win over Northern Illinois, making the drama in Bloomington look less like an outlying blip than an emerging trend. The pieces aren’t fitting together as well as they did last winter. The offense has an abundance of talent but no real identity and a penchant for shooting itself in the foot…

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