On the surface, it's hard to find much to worry about with Ohio State right now. The nation's consensus No. 1 team improved to 8-0 on Saturday without too much trouble, dropping the clutch on Penn State in the second half en route to a 38-14 win. Julian Sayin had more touchdowns (four) than incompletions (three), the duo of Jeremiah Smith and Carnell Tate remain unstoppable and the defense allowed a paltry 3.3 yards per play against a Nittany Lions team stuck with a backup quarterback. No one's come within 17 points of the Buckeyes since that season-opening win over Texas, and they're almost certainly a lock for the College Football Playoff already.
Of course, with a program like Ohio State, it's never enough to simply use everyone else's standards for success. That's always been true at a place that has hardly ever known failure over the last century or so, that nearly fired a coach who went on to win a national title last season, that refers to a corner of its fan base as the "lunatic fringe" and means it as the highest of compliments. But it's even more true when they've lost four in a row against Michigan. Simply being undefeated and outmatching your opponents to date isn't enough; the Buckeyes have to leave no doubt.
And by that standard, you can understand why there's just a hint of uneasiness amid all the easy victories of late. You wouldn't know it by looking at the scoreboard, but Ohio State isn't making it look quite as effortless as you'd like — a nagging undercurrent of doubt that feels destined to once again rear its head at the worst possible time.
Ohio State is on cruise control, but there are warning signs under the surface
Again, we're picking nits here. The defense is, by pretty much every metric, the most dominant in the country, one of a select few to allow fewer than 17 points in each of its first eight games. The offense is among the most efficient in the nation. The question is not "is Ohio State an excellent team?" The question is, "is Ohio State's record against a fairly underwhelming schedule masking some weaknesses that like competition may eventually exploit?"
Viewed through that lens, you can start to see some warts if you squint. The running game remains stuck in neutral: Ohio State ran for 164 yards on Saturday, but that includes a 51-yarder from Bo Jackson with under 11 minutes to play and the game already long since decided; take that out, and their other 31 carries netted a total of 113 yards, good for less than four yards per rush. And for as good as Sayin and the passing game have been, big plays have been frustratingly hard to come by, as a two-safety shell tries to keep Smith and Tate from blowing the lid off of games.
Rather than a fireworks show, Ohio State is more like a boa constrictor, slowly squeezing the life out of teams with inevitability of the defense and arguably the two best wide receivers in the country. The problem though, as we saw in the Texas game, is that the boa constrictor act doesn't work nearly as well against a team that's your physical equal or something close to it. Eventually, you need to make plays to win games — and if you want to know how things can go wrong when a talented team insists on playing in a phone booth, look no further than last year's Michigan game.
All of which should give Buckeye fans deja vu as Michigan looms
Once again, the Wolverines are a good team with a seemingly hard ceiling on their potential in Bryce Underwood's true freshman season. The defense is solid, the running game is once again a bear to deal with, and the forward pass doesn't figure into things very much. Sure, Mason Graham and Kenneth Grant are gone, but the broad outline of this Michigan team should feel very familiar.
And that should fill Ohio State fans with dread. That was the formula that doomed the Buckeyes in one of the most shocking editions of The Game in the rivalry's history, in which the Wolverines kept everything in front of them and relied on OSU's inability to run the ball against light boxes. Sure, the Bucks have been impressive to start this season. But what's changed, exactly? This running game is still searching for answers, and now has to find them without Chip Kelly in the booth. The passing game still struggles to connect on the sorts of big plays that serve as oxygen to an offense.
And that's not even touching on what happens when the Buckeyes meet a ferocious Indiana defense (and explosive offense) in the Big Ten title game, or any number of SEC heavyweights in the College Football Playoff. Eventually, Ohio State is going to run into a team good enough to force it to play left-handed. And it's still an open question whether the Buckeyes have that in their bag.