Ohio State Strategy Of Not Covering DeVonta Smith Backfires
I don’t follow college football very closely, but even I knew that Alabama wide receiver DeVonta Smith won the Heisman Trophy. He had shown a knack for making big plays and blowing games wide open. If you didn’t watch any other Alabama game all year, his specialness should have been evident in the game against Notre Dame.
Going into the College Football National Championship Game against Ohio State, Alabama was likely thinking the Buckeyes would pull out all the stops to stop Smith. Double coverage. Bracket coverage. Two high safeties and press coverage. Various zone coverages. I don’t fucking know. Anything and everything.
Ohio State, instead, was apparently trying to surprise Alabama with a completely different gameplan: not covering Smith at all. Unfortunately, this didn’t play out very well for Ohio State, as Smith went for 2,437 yards and 44 touchdowns in the first half alone, breaking every receiving record in the history of the sport.
I love creativity and trying new things, but the strategy of not trying to cover the other team’s best player, who is also the best player in the country, feels a bit dangerous to me. It was a bold strategy, Cotton, that didn’t pay off.
Ohio State didn’t even try to hide this strategy, either, at one point just throwing their slow white linebacker on him.
My bank account trying to keep up with my online shopping during the pandemic pic.twitter.com/zOo9w28p0i
— Caroline Darney (@cwdarney) January 12, 2021
You hate to see it. Hopefully teams in the NFL will learn something from this, before we see Smith take over the league in his rookie season.
first look at devonta smith in a dolphins uniform pic.twitter.com/LXXB4oinmk
— josh houtz (@houtz) January 12, 2021
All in all, it’s just a good thing that Ohio State fans are used to getting absolutely embarrassed on national TV. Experience is important! We know exactly how to hide our sadness deep down inside so no one sees it, until we finally snap while using an anonymous username on a random fan message board. It probably makes it worse that the Big 10 cheated and changed the rules just to allow this massacre to happen. I wish they would have just cancelled the Buckeyes before DeVonta Smith did.
