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USC vs. (t)OSU pt. 3: The Rushing Game feat. Chris Wells

Bumped - Laughing Stock one again does a great job as he offers Part III of his look at Ohio State. Here is Part I and Part II...Paragon

Sorry I took so long to get this up, but anyways let's examine the highly touted Ohio State running game*

Wells and the Ohio State Rushing Offense
Opponents Ohio State Rushing Chris Wells Rushing % Wells
Team Rush D Rnk SOS Rnk Rush Att. Yards YPA Rush Att. Yards YPA % Att % Yards
Youngstown St. I-AA 141 41 147 3.59 16 46 2.88 39.02% 31.29%
Akron 88 96 41 196 4.78 20 143 7.15 48.78% 72.96%
Washington 89 55 46 263 5.72 24 135 5.63 52.17% 51.33%
Northwestern 74 86 42 191 4.55 12 100 8.33 28.57% 52.36%
Minnesota 114 123 47 250 5.32 24 116 4.83 51.06% 46.40%
Purdue 54 71 45 181 4.02 18 85 4.72 40.00% 46.96%
Kent St. 60 102 36 138 3.83 4 17 4.25 11.11% 12.32%
Michigan St. 30 52 47 229 4.87 31 221 7.13 65.96% 96.51%
Penn St. 7 63 48 200 4.17 25 133 5.32 52.08% 66.50%
Wisconsin 42 57 36 211 5.86 21 169 8.05 58.33% 80.09%
Illinois 36 42 36 180 5.00 20 76 3.80 55.56% 42.22%
Michigan 58 37 59 229 3.88 39 222 5.69 66.10% 96.94%
LSU 12 11 30 145 4.83 20 146 7.30 66.67% 100.69%
TOTAL - - 554 2560 - 274 1609 - - -
AVERAGE 55 66 42.75 201.08 4.74 21.50 130.25 6.02 49.70% 63.77%

Now these are stats you can set your watch by, if you had some kind of weird football watch... I guess**. Anyways, sloppy use of cliches aside, Tressel obviously likes to run the ball. If you read part 1 you probably already know this as OSU ran the ball 63% of the time last year. Take a look at the Rush Att column for Ohio State though, and save for one notable exception the team rushed at least 36 times in every game and generally attempted to run the ball 40 or more times. What really stands out, however, are the numbers for LSU and Michigan which tend to stand out from the others. Looking closely at the individual games and statistics though, its clear what made these two games special.

In the LSU game Ohio State was simply dominated by the Tigers D and along with 3 turnovers (2 INT, 1 Fumble) their time of possession was a measly 26 minutes their lowest TOP of the season. The situation was exactly the opposite in the Michigan game, where Ohio State's defense allowed a microscopic 91 yards... total! More importantly though, Ohio State held the ball for almost 38 minutes. Without putting up the tables or going into great detail about what this means statistically, the standard deviation for the number of rushing plays per minute is less than 10% of the average for the season, and every game's runs/min is well within two standard deviations of the average. In layman's terms this means that the Buckeye Coaches have a fairly concrete game plan with regards to how often they want to run the ball, and they seem to stick to it regardless of the circumstances. To put it plainly, this is definitely good news for USC.

With that in mind, let us talk about Chris "Beanie" Wells. Its clear from the table that Wells did not get any help from OSU's fairly weak out of conference schedule. Against Youngstown, Kent, and Akron he racked up only 206 yards or about 69 yards per game, nowhere near his season average of about 130 yards. This may prompt some to immediately think Wells will rush for 2,000 yards or some other astronomical number thanks to huge games against weak OOC opponents, but it would be surprising for me to see him used significantly against Youngstown St or Ohio with USC coming up on September 13th. If the coaches will learn anything from those early season games it will be how the Bucks plan on using speedy reserve back Brandon Saine***.

Getting back to Wells, it is clear that he was switched on going into the second half of the season. Before the Kent St game he never had more than 52% of the carries, but afterwards he never had fewer than 52% of the teams carries. I cannot say whether this is attributable to injuries or if Tressel simply decided to start using Beanie as their primary running back, but regardless of the circumstances the implications are the same. For the season Wells had just under 50% of the team's total rushing attempts. However, over the final six games he had about 61% of the carries. Knowing from before that OSU runs the ball more often than the offense passes, we find that Wells accounted for nearly 40% of OSU's offense**** over the 2nd half of the season. Given the huge role Wells plays in the Buckeye offense, it is clear that stopping him (or at least limiting him) may very well be the same as stopping Ohio State's offense.

note*: Rnk of course means rank, while SOS stands for strength of schedule. SOS rankings were taken from Jeff Sagarin (whose rankings are used as part of the BCS formula).

note**: Why put in SOS rank? With approximately 300 teams in all of division I no team comes close to playing every other team or even an approximation of playing every other team. Having rush defense rank alongside strength of schedule gives a better idea of how good a team's rush D really is.

note***: As a true freshman, Saine had 60 rushing attempts for 267 yards. He also had 12 receptions for 160 yards. It is very possible that OSU may try to use him similarly to how USC plans on using Joe McKnight, albeit to a lesser extent.

note****: You may be thinking that perhaps Beanie plays an even bigger role in their offense due to receiving yards, but you would be wrong in this case. Wells had a grand total of 5 receptions for 21 yards.

This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of Conquest Chronicles' writers or editors. It does reflect the views of this particular fan though, which is as important as the views of Conquest Chronicles' writers or editors.

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