Ohio State Vs YSU: This Was Our Week 1 Expectation

The Ohio State Buckeyes move to 2-0 on the 2023 college football season by defeating Youngstown State 35-7 in their home-opener at Ohio Stadium in Columbus this past Saturday afternoon. I think what we saw this week was closer to what we were expecting to see in week 1 when they beat Big Ten opponent Indiana in Bloomington. However, sometimes having a few new quarterbacks on the roster fighting for the starting spot can take a week or two. Buckeyes fans have been extremely spoiled by their recent riches at the most important position in all of sport. They’ve ripped off a Braxton Miller, a JT Barrett, a Cardale Jones, a Dwayne Haskins, a Justin Fields, and a CJ Stroud just to name a few in recent years. Well, this time around OSU fans around the world will have to wait longer than 4 minutes into a game to get that kind of production at that spot.

The Buckeyes got closer this week as they jumped on the Penguins scoring 28 of those points in the first half. A lot of that coming from Marvin Harrison Jr as he got off early ending the 1st quarter with a stat line good enough for an entire game as he went into the 2nd quarter already having 4 catches for 122 yards, and 2 touchdowns. He would finish with 7 for 160 and those 2 tuddies. It was nice to see his counterpart Emeka Egbuka get his season roaring ahead as he finished with 5 receptions for 94 yards and a touchdown himself. The running game kept pace as TreVeyon Henderson ended with 2 touchdowns also carrying the ball 5 times for 56 yards.

As far as the quarterback position goes, I think we’ve seen enough to know that Kyle McCord is most likely the starter moving forward, for now. He started this game also and had a very nice game going 14/20, 258 yards, 3 TD’s, and most importantly 0 interceptions. Devin Brown got reps also as his stat line was 7/13 for 101 yards. He led the offense down on a nice long drive at one point, but there were a few times he got happy feet in the pocket and over threw or missed his target in the process. He did show his play making on a few plays that he did very well extending, but I think right now McCord is more consistent and has better command of the offense as a whole. It’s time to hand the keys to machine completely to McCord for the full week upcoming against Western Kentucky as they have one more tune-up before heading to South Bend to play the #9 Notre Dame Fighting Irish in primetime. That will be their first true test to see if they can hang in for another title run. We should also mention that after getting bullied early and giving up an early TD, the defensive line and the rest of the D looked just as good in week 2 and seem to have that fire back that fans have been looking for the last few years. Either way it was nice to see the O-Line clean up early penalties and everyone make a nice step in the right direction getting better each week.