Will Shunning Big 10 Classicism Hurt Ohio State?

I do not believe there is definitive analytic information about whether Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio possesses a sense of humor. Dantonio is a Nick Saban disciple, a stern tactician who often makes his mentor look like Jimmy Fallon by comparison; Dantonio's perpetual dyspeptic scowl is the look of a man who would prefer to live in a hermetically sealed chamber with access to nothing but the following week's game film and a pack of sugarless gum.

In other words, Dantonio is a classical Big Ten coach who has embraced and perfected classical football in the way no other Big Ten program has in this era. And that's not something I'm not sure can be said about Ohio State coach Urban Meyer.

That, to me, was the ironic bent regarding the criticism of Ohio State's game plan after Michigan State's 17-14 defeat of the Buckeyes, by running back Ezekiel Elliott and others: The consensus appeared to be that Ohio State played too close to the vest. Even Meyer admitted this; Meyer said specifically that the play-calling was "very conservative." And to a certain extent, that's probably true; as SB Nation's Ian Boyd noted, a few deep passes might have been enough to break open the Michigan State defense.

But I wonder if part of the underlying problem is not just that Ohio State played too conservatively, given the perfect storm unfolding around them. I wonder if part of the problem is also the same thing that's allowed Meyer to dominate the Big Ten since he arrived: That the Buckeyes aren't constructed like a traditional Big Ten team, because Meyer doesn't want to play that way. For several years now, that's worked to their advantage; for several years now, the overarching notion has been that Meyer would liberalize the Big Ten with speed and offensive versatility. Last year, Ohio State led the conference with nearly 45 points per game. This year, the Buckeyes are down to 34.4 points per game. The top scoring team in the conference, Indiana, is 34th (34.5 ppg) in the country in points per game. Ohio State ranks 36th with 34.4 ppg.

"Trying to run the ball inside [against Michigan State] was a nightmare all day for Ohio State," Boyd wrote for SB Nation.

That's the astounding thing about the Big Ten. There is no question that the quality of the football being played has improved dramatically this season. But there's also no question that in improving its quality of play, the Big Ten has also regressed to its roots. It has embraced its classicism; it is the Bert Cooper of conferences. Take time of possession, a statistic that modern coaches like Baylor's Art Briles have basically dismissed as a meaningless numeral. For the most part, Briles is right: Of the top ten teams in the country in time of possession, three have fewer than three losses this year. Two of those are Michigan and Michigan State (the third is Stanford, which is the Pac-12 team that plays like a Big Ten program); undefeated Iowa is 14th.

And where is Ohio State? The Buckeyes are 84th. So this old school measure of efficiency still matters in the Big 10.

This worked to Michigan State's advantage last Saturday. Dantonio has become a great college football coach in large part because he feels slighted by everything—sometimes for good reason—and he manages to convey that feeling onto his players, many of whom were shunned in the recruiting process by schools like Ohio State and Michigan. There was little question, in the wake of Michigan State's victory last Saturday, that the Spartans utilized that feeling to outplay Ohio State. But there was also an acknowledgment by Dantonio that the Spartans also got just the slightest bit lucky, because the conditions were Dantonio-esque: Cold and gray and windy and spitting rain. It was the kind of weather where time of possession really mattered.

"I guess you could say it was the perfect storm," Dantonio said after Spartans' kicker Michael Geiger hit a 41-yard field goal and then inexplicably transformed himself into a human windmill. I imagine that was the closest Dantonio will ever come to acknowledging that his team gets breaks sometimes, too.

And so this Saturday, the Buckeyes will play at Michigan, and there is no rain in the forecast. But it will be frigid and possible gray. As Penn State learned last week in a loss the Wolverines (and other teams learned before them), Michigan is a team that will not easily give way to finesse. Neither will Michigan State. These are teams that are built in ways that often feel antiquated in the spread-offense era, but not within the narrower paradigm of the Big Ten itself.

"It was kind of that game I can't stand," Meyer said on Saturday. "Those are tough to watch now and tough to be a part of. When you start playing field position like that — been in a couple of situations in my career where you're in a blizzard. It wasn't a blizzard, but it was a tough situation."

I still think Ohio State is the premier program in the conference; I still think Meyer is positioned to win many games by doing things his way. But there is something to be said for the cliché of Midwestern football, for the notion that a perfect storm will come along more often in Ohio than it does in, say, Florida. These are the things that Meyer will have to teach to himself as much as to his players.