Speed major focus for Ohio State football
Going into the 2007 BCS National Championship game, Ohio State was undefeated, the consensus No. 1 team in America and heavily favored to beat Urban Meyer’s Florida Gators for college football’s ultimate prize. Coming out of the title game the Buckeyes were outmatched, overpowered and more than anything else, slow, losing to the Gators 41-14. A longtime weakness of the Big Ten has been its inability to match the speed of teams from the SEC, Big 12 and Pac-12. Since Meyer’s return to his home state of Ohio to head the OSU football program, speed has become a focus of the No. 2 ranked Buckeyes in fall camp. Young players like freshman running back Dontre Wilson have been the talk of Columbus since practices started, showing off blazing speed that Meyer thinks this incoming freshman class can add to an already quick team. “Well the ‘06 team did that at Florida. The ‘06 team injected a bunch of speed and playmakers into that 2006 team. I see very similar qualities,” Meyer said. “You look again and you see what number that is and I feel like same way on offense. I feel a little bit of a jolt that’s really going to help us.” At an OSU Media Day, Wilson said he was in a new situation coming into a team and not being the fastest player on the field. “I don’t know, I could probably say that right now about (Bradley) Roby. I don’t know me and him haven’t raced or anything like that yet,” Wilson said of who he thought was the fastest on the team. “I’ve been pretty much one of the fastest players on each of the teams I’ve played on.” Junior wide receiver Evan Spencer was a big part of the offense last season, finishing fourth on the team in both receptions and yards, but has seen a vast improvement in the team’s second year under Meyer’s system. Spencer said he’s confident the team knows its playbook so far. “We’ve still got a lot of tricks up our sleeve and a lot of concepts that we didn’t put in, but in terms of the base core stuff that we’ve got in, everybody’s got it down (pat)
