Bill Landis

If you want to go down that road and look at it, it's like all those defenses were very good.

None of those defenses gave up anything scoring-wise.

Indiana gave up 11.7.

Miami gave up 11.8.

Texas Tech gave up 14.8.

Ohio State gave up 9.3.

They were all efficient.

The outlier among those four excellent defenses is that Ohio State did not generate nearly as much havoc.

um and some of that is luck because some of its turnovers i think some of it's not because some of it is sacks and tackles for loss and sort of like how creative and aggressive you choose to be um some of its personnel driven as well like that some of those teams had some monster pass rushers that maybe ohio state didn't necessarily have um

It doesn't mean Ohio State had a bad defense.

Ohio State had an excellent defense last year.

But if you're looking for separating factors among the best defenses in the country last year, I think you can point to Ohio State's scoring margin, which was the best in the country, or scoring average was the best in the country, and say it was Ohio State.

Or you can look at some of this other stuff and say it was probably one of these other defenses because they didn't give up anything scoring-wise, but also really got after teams.

And Ohio State did not quite meet that second bar the same way those other teams did.

Are you going to be operating on the clean, freaky spectrum?

And you want Ohio State a little more toward the freaks?

And by freak, I don't mean freak athletes.

By freak, I mean like, freak it, let's get weird.

And do some stuff to create some epic.

Very freaky.