Alabama Football: Is Ohio State a Clone of Mississippi State?
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — If Alabama is looking for a blueprint on how to beat Ohio State in the first round of the College Football Playoff, it doesn’t have to look very far.
It only has to travel about 80 miles west on Highway 82 to get to Starkville, Mississippi.
Mississippi State head coach Dan Mullen spent four years as an offensive coordinator under Urban Meyer at Florida and four more years before that as his quarterbacks coach at Utah and Bowling Green.
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The two have more or less kept their offenses the same and run variations of the same system at Mississippi State and Ohio State.
Alabama handled a very good Bulldogs team—No. 1 at the time—when they came to Tuscaloosa in November, a team that looks a lot like Ohio State. The Crimson Tide can use a lot of the same techniques they employed in that game when they square off with the Buckeyes in the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 1.
“(Ohio State is) a great team,” Alabama safety Nick Perry said. “I see a lot of similarities between them and Mississippi State. They like to establish the run game and they have a lot of great receivers they like to get the ball out to in space and make big plays.”
Alabama held Mississippi State below its season average in just about every statistical category on Nov. 15:
| Passing yards | 266.33 | 290 |
| Rushing yards | 239.83 | 138 |
| Points | 37.2 | 20 |
| Yards per play | 6.62 | 4.86 |
The Crimson Tide did that by limiting the things that that offense does well.
That starts with the quarterback, who is a central part of the system. Dak Prescott was at his best on designed runs, especially in short-yardage and goal-line situations. That keeps defenses honest with the threat of the run.
He gained 82 yards on the ground, but those came on 22 carries, his second-highest total of the season at the time. His 3.73 yards per carry were his second-lowest average of the season in an SEC game.
That trickled over to the rest of the run game, which otherwise gained just 56 yards on the ground.
“Mostly the uptempo, kind of the run game,” Perry continued, when asked how Mississippi State and Ohio State were similar to each other. “They like to incorporate the quarterback into the run game more, similar to what they used to do with Tim Tebow back in the day. They are a physical team. They are going to be hard to stop. We have to game-plan and hopefully we can stop them.”
Perry later added that Saban and defensive coordinator Kirby Smart have been showing the team film of Tebow and their Florida offense, an offense that Alabama has had success against in the past.
That influence has been prevalent this year in Columbus. Prescott and Ohio State quarterback J.T. Barrett had very similar numbers this season, including a similar run/pass distribution.
| J.T. Barrett | 236.2 | 34/10 | 78.17 | 11 |
| Dak Prescott | 249.7 | 24/10 | 78.25 | 13 |
But it won’t be so cut and dried for Alabama.
Barrett got hurt against Michigan and won’t play in the bowl game. So Ohio State will move on to its third quarterback this year, Cardale Jones, who played well for Ohio State in the Big Ten title game.
Alabama has limited film on Jones, but he more or less ran the same system against Wisconsin. That’s why Alabama has been digging back into the history books to study this offense. Even though the players have changed, the overall philosophy hasn’t.
“There are similarities,” Saban said. “They certainly have different kinds of players, very good skill players, very good running back. You know, we’re not sure about how much we’ve seen of the quarterback but their quarterback has done a really good job the past two years, whether it was Braxton Miller when he played or Barrett when he played because they were great runners and great athletes and that combination was very, very difficult on a lot of people and difficult for us when we played a team like that.”
Jones probably isn’t as quick a runner as Barrett was, but he is a bigger, more powerful runner more similar to Prescott.
And he’ll be able to run the basics of Meyer’s offense, a system that Saban is very familiar with, since he faces it every year.
“There is a lot of similarities,” Saban said. “Dan and Urban were together at Florida. But I think the way they do it—they have their own style of doing it, and I think they’ve progressed. This is a very, very good offensive team that has been very, very productive and they’ve got really good players and they do a great job with them and this is going to be a real big challenge for us in this game.”
Marc Torrence is the Alabama lead writer for Bleacher Report. All quotes were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.
Follow on Twitter @marctorrence.
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