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Welcome back to Buck I Talk.

I'm Stephen Means, and that's Stefan Christick, and this is your Leave No Doubt Monday Pod.

Every week we try to answer the question of did Ohio State leave no doubt in his game?

And sometimes that's as simple as like, did you win the football game?

And sometimes it's, you know, focused on a specific subject.

And sometimes we take big picture conversations.

Today is focused on a specific subject.

It's just two subjects.

One of the subjects was already planned to be part of today's festivities. And then at like 1130 on Sunday right before noon, Ohio State decided to kick off the Julian San Jeremiah Smith-Smithsman Trophy campaign, which I know, for those of you who are on social media, the lunatic fringe has been at it for about a month now saying Ohio State needs to promote his players better. And November 2nd got here and they started promoting their players better. And I guess I can ask you that. We'll get into the second half of the pod. But let's start with the reason why they were able to, I don't know, promote their players better. And it's because of what the players did on the football field on Saturday.

We are going to go back and look at all 29 plays of the first half and then the first drive

of the second half. And the only reason we're doing the plays of the second half to begin with is because there's literally four times Ohio State has the ball in the first half. And one of them, C.J. Donaldson fumbled the ball in the first play. So it's not like really a drive, which it's kind of unfortunate because I do feel like that would have been a good drive to like learn about Ohio State in a two-minute drill in a situation where the game is close, right? Because they haven't had a lot of those moments, but unfortunately that moment was robbed of us because, again, CJ Donaldson fumbled on the first flight. Before we get into things, Stefan, we're going to have another moment here. That I'll bring up later when we're done. Every so often I have these moments where I like, man, I wish Gillis was on this pod. And it's not because I want to tell him he's right about anything. In fact, I want to point out just how

wrong he was and stick it to him a little bit. And there's, there's, there's no, no, we have recruiting pods. And there's sometimes where I'm like, I wish Stefan was here so he could hear this right now because I think he needs to hear this too and they don't do pods without me so

they don't get to have moments where they're like I wish Stephen was here so I could stick it to

him in this moment.

If they did, then, you know, they still wouldn't have those moments. 30 actual snaps in the first half, Stefan, because one of them obviously doesn't count in the box score because it's a penalty so it gets wiped away, right? And so that one doesn't count. But I'm going to talk about that one too because it's important within what they were trying to do in those moments. And it also allows me to tell you this stat before I let you do some talking because I know I've been talking for three straight minutes here. 30 snaps. 16 were on first down. So even if you take away the, okay, every drive starts on first down, five, that's 12 other plays where they snap the ball and it was first down. The level of efficiency and explosiveness, and I know what we talked a little bit about that on the post game part, but it's just so apparent after you rewatch the game and get a chance to dive into some things.

16 plays on first down.

On plays that were second and short, which is what I classified as anything that's five yards or less, three plays.

Plays that were second and long.

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