What drives OSU fans nuts is seeing Burrow now at LSU showing that he was capable of both. I know that I was saying this a couple of years ago. I thought he ran well enough to be successful in Meyer's system, but also threw the ball well enough to take the top off the defense and get the safeties out of the box. But Meyer was loyal to JT to a fault.
I know this is not quantifiable, but I feel that if Fields had transferred in while JT was there and Meyer was still the HC, Fields would be warming the bench as Meyer would have stubbornly stayed with JT come hell or high water. Of all the great things Meyer did at and for OSU, he limited himself with his blind loyalty to certain players and coaches.
The sudden turnaround in the defense this year is evidence of that. Schiano while probably a very good coach, was stubbornly unwilling to change his defensive philosophy in order to correct problems with the Defense. A good head coach would have addressed this early on, but Meyer did not do much to force Shciano to change things up due to his loyalty. Day comes in, fires the entire Def staff (save Larry Johnson) and look at the results with essentially the same players.
We'll start at the top. Do you feel RS freshman Burrow was better than RS junior Burrow? Simple question, but it stay a lot about setting the table.
Moving on to the non-quantifible part. I think this is interesting because it's not at all unique to Urbs. Fans across the country assume their coach loves their not great QB to a fault. It's pretty common. At a point, we must ask, are all these coaches watching hours of practice films and misjudging all of it (maybe), or are fans by and large built to believe what they've hardly seen is better than what they often see? This is not to say it's 100 percent one way or the other, only that this common feeling might be endemic in the kind of optimism we see in ourselves.
The Schiano thing speaks to another sort of splintered perspective. You're saying the coach would've addressed it early on. I assume you mean early last season, maybe after the suspension? Because here's the thing. You know who built the two best OSU defenses in the Urbs era? That'd be
Schiano. His first two were better than Ash's, notably better. Should he have been fired after doing that back-to-back years? Or are we prisoners of rather emotional moments.
(Also worth noting, the new OSU DC was demoted by Michigan, basically passed over twice, and now has this. Maybe it's just the odd nature of CFB at play?)
The larger point is this, it's one of entitlement. OSU fans assume these are 15-0 teams and it is incumbent upon the coaches not to mismanage them down to only playoff teams. There is no thought that it's hard to be that good, that consistently contending, that there's an easy fix if only some young player were handed the job without putting in the work. We ignore the oddity of the sport, the fact almost no one goes undefeated and only one team wins each season. Perhaps the earlier part is how sports should be and really is, but I remain skeptical.