Ball State Game: The FULL Picture

Zach Smith · 2026-09-06T23:28:18+00:00

Ohio State 56, Ball State 3: The Tape Says Julian Sayin Is Ready. It Also Says Right Tackle Isn't. Week 1 film review — Menace2Sports I watched every snap of this thing twice, both sides of the ball, and I'm going to tell you the same thing I'd tell a room full of players on a Sunday: the scoreboard lied to you, and it lied in both directions. 56-3 makes it sound like there's nothing to fix. There's plenty to fix. But it also undersells what I actually saw from the quarterback, because Julian Sayin didn't just play well against a bad football team. He played like a guy who has seen the picture before, and that is the single hardest thing to fake. So let's get into it. Offense first, then defense, and I'm not going to bury the problem — I'm going to lead with it after I tell you about the good. Julian Sayin gave you the one thing you needed 320 yards. PFF put him at a 93.1 overall and a 92.6 passing grade on 47 snaps, and nobody else on the offense cracked 90. That's the number. Here's what the number doesn't tell you. Fourth-and-goal. Ohio State goes for it. They run mesh, and Ball State is in match coverage — everybody covered, every defender with their back turned to the football. That's the rep. That's the whole thing. Sayin doesn't panic, doesn't drift, doesn't bail backward. He climbs, he recognizes that in match coverage there's nobody looking at him, he makes the last man miss and he walks into the end zone from three yards out. I've coached quarterbacks who take four years to learn that. Some never learn it. He backed it up all afternoon. The out-and-up to Jeremiah for 48 — watch the safety on that one, not the ball. Jeremiah gives him a little out stem, the safety levels off, and that's the entire play. The speed does the rest. Sayin let it go when Jeremiah still had two yards of separation to create. That's trust and that's timing. Then the back-shoulder fade inside the five with the defender's back turned. Then the late-hands touchdown in the red zone where Jeremiah isn't even open by any normal definition — he's open because the corner's eyes are in the backfield and the ball placement is perfect. Eight catches, 151 yards, two scores, and Jeremiah Smith did all of that before halftime. He also executed a full two-minute drill and finished it with a touchdown. I know it's Ball State. I don't care. You have to be able to do it against them before you can do it against anybody, and last year this offense didn't always look like it could. Now the nitpicks, because that's what we do here. He left corner routes on the field. Not one — at least three. The Brock Boyd rep late in the first half is the one that bugs me. Boyd runs a corner, gets separation at the top of the stem, and Sayin has a clean pocket and all the space in the world to drop it on the pylon and let a young receiver get his first career touchdown. He checks it down instead. Fine result, wrong throw. Same story in the red zone when Jeremiah came wide open on the backside and Sayin instead put too much mustard on a checkdown to Bo Jackson, who dropped it. That's a three-touchdown day that became a two-touchdown day. Those are the Joe Burrow throws. The cocky ones. I've got space, I can fit it, it's going there. He's going to need every one of them in Austin. Right tackle is a problem and I'm not going to soften it Phillip Daniels went the wrong way on the first play of the game. The first play. Of the season. As a returning starter. Against Ball State. Call it nerves. I'd buy that from a freshman. This is a guy who started a full year of college football. And it wasn't a one-off — he was bad all day, they benched him after two drives, they put him back in, and he got beat again. Let me coach it for you instead of just yelling about it. Daniels doesn't pass set. He gets top-heavy — head out over his toes, waist bending instead of sitting his hips down — and then he turns his shoulders and lunges with a punch. There's no name for what he's doing because it isn't a technique. And because he's late and out of position, his hands end up outside the frame constantly. He got away with holding at least twice that I saw live and I wrote about it on the site. The cleanest way to see it: run Ian Moore's pass set and Daniels' pass set side by side on the same possession. Moore kick-slides, stays square, punches inside. Daniels turns and grabs. Same offense, same drill work, completely different product. In the run game it's the same story. On the stretch play where 70 veers inside, Austin Siereveld owns the B-gap and Daniels has the C — the second that defender crosses Siereveld's face, somebody has to snap outside and take the spiking end. Nobody does. Daniels just gets moved. The grades were kinder to him than the tape: 59.8 overall, 67.6 in pass protection. Take a look at the snap counts instead. Hinzman, Moore, Montgomery and Siereveld all played 47. Daniels played 32. The staff told you what they thought. But here's the conundrum, and this is the actual story for this week: Gabe VanSickle isn't the obvious answer. He took a holding penalty and a false start against a MAC team, and he graded 60.1. Ohio State committed four offensive penalties in a 53-point win, and a bunch of them belong to those two. VanSickle also had the single best offensive line rep of the entire game. He gets jabbed, feels no rusher on him, and his eyes snap outside looking for the twist. He picks it up, Siereveld comes off clean, Sayin never gets touched. That is elite, coached, veteran-level protection work. Shout out Arthur Smith and Tyler Bowen — that's an 86.0 pass-blocking grade for a reason. So the choice this week is Daniels at tackle or a shuffle that gets VanSickle on the field. Neither one is comfortable. Both are better than what happened Saturday. The rest of the line, briefly Carson Hinzman was clean and picked up twists all day — 72.1 overall, 77.9 in protection, and he was the anchor when the right side got busy. Austin Siereveld was the repeat offender on zone rules. He's hopping instead of continuing on stretch, he's falling down, he's not snapping outside on the B/C exchange. He was wrong on a play that Ja'Kobi Jackson made right with his legs. Give him this, though: there's a rep on Bo's long touchdown where he just covers a guy up, body on body, wherever the defender wants to go, and it's a huge part of why that run pops. Ian Moore is the mixed bag. Some genuinely outstanding pass sets — best on the roster on those reps — and then he gets completely whipped by a Ball State linebacker on split zone, and turns his hips on a stretch that gives up a tackle for loss. When he doesn't turn back, the play seals and Bo walks in. He showed you both versions in the same afternoon. Ball State got two sacks. Two. Jared Badie and Anthony Pinnace, both newcomers. Texas has better than that on the third string. Field position is the quiet problem nobody's talking about Three drives started inside the 10-yard line. The one, the six, and the ten. Why? Legend Bey bringing kickoffs out of the end zone. Against Ball State that's a curiosity. In Austin, on the road, in a night game, that's how you go three-and-out backed up, punt from your own end zone, and hand a top-five offense a short field. It's the most fixable thing on this entire list and it needs to be fixed by Saturday. Devin McCuin was the biggest eye-opener on the roster If you've been subscribed here you know his UTSA film was fine. It was okay. Nothing that made me sit up. He looks like a completely different player. The release is explosive, the top end is real, the route detail is there, and he made a defender miss on the RPO for the third touchdown of the day. 81.3 overall on 37 snaps — more snaps than Jeremiah Smith played. But the thing that made me rewind was the blocking. He's push-cracking safeties in the run game. Laying out to do it. He posted an 88.8 run-blocking grade, which is the best mark on the offense by a receiver, and it isn't an accident — that's the Evan Spencer effect and it's showing up on tape everywhere. You want corners tackling running backs. The way you get that is receivers taking safeties out of the picture. This room is doing it now.