Ryan Day is trying to get his entire team to play a four-quarter game. That’s not him asking Ohio State to make every game come down to the fourth quarter. He wants his team to win every quarter, including the fourth.
The Buckeyes are still working on that. The fourth quarter was pretty good in Saturday’s 31-14 win at Iowa. It was not entirely perfect. While the Buckeyes are still searching for that, here’s something they can bank on: They’re deadly at the end of the second quarter.
Ohio State has played five games. In all of them, the offense has scored a touchdown with 15 or fewer seconds left in the second quarter. It happened again on Saturday. That’s where OSU won this game.
It was up by only four points, the result of its own missed opportunities, miscues, and the general weirdness every opposing team encounters at Kinnick Stadium. Then, the offense got the ball back on its own 16-yard line with 1:48 left. This team can make you feel a lot of things. Some of it maddening. But when the offense gets the ball with a chance to execute a two-minute drill before halftime, you should feel like they’re going to score.
That’s when Julian Sayin is at his best. It’s when the offense really sings.
“We work on it,” Ryan Day said last week, when a 10-play touchdown drive to end the first half against Illinois was just the latest in this remarkable run of late first-half scoring.
He hadn’t yet seen the nine-play, 84-yard masterpiece his team had up its sleeve at Iowa.