I’m not sure I buy that Clemson should be a touchdown favorite against Ohio State. I get it. Clemson’s got this habit of peaking coming into the playoff. Ohio State’s yet to look great for four straight quarters. My impression is that Ohio State probably has, on paper, more talent, but they’ve yet to produce like Clemson’s talent has. Numbers like F+ (the combination of Bill Connelly’s SP+ and Brian Fremeau’s FEI) say Clemson has the best defense in the country. I believe them. F+ also says Ohio State’s offense is worse than only that of Alabama. At times, it appears that’s true. At others, it doesn’t.
And so it seems there are two main questions here. The first is whether Ohio State’s offense will play its best, with a subquestion being for how many quarters it will play its best. The second is what’s going to happen when Trevor Lawrence has the ball.
Trevor Lawrence is a remarkable football player. But he’s not immune from turning the ball over. There’s a perception from Ohio State’s two close games, in which Justin Fields threw a combined five interceptions, that Fields is a turnover risk. He might be one. But on a career per-attempt basis, Fields has thrown fewer picks than Lawrence. It’s close: Fields thrown one every 69.6 attempts, Lawrence has thrown one every 68.1 attempts. And this year, Lawrence has been much better with the football than his counterpart, with the former landing right around his career average in interceptions per attempt and the latter more than doubling his career rate. But still: Over the largest sample size we have, the two are comparable.
The matchup when Clemson has the ball isn’t going to look all that different from when Ohio State has the ball. It’s an undercard, sure—Clemson’s defense is better than its offense, the reverse is true of Ohio State—but it figures to be a rather even match in terms of how well Clemson can move the ball on the air and on the ground. The reason we’re focusing so much on turnovers here is that this is potentially Ohio State’s path to changing that situation, and it’s one the Buckeyes have relied on before. Ohio State beat Indiana by a touchdown. The Buckeye defense took the ball away four times. Ohio State beat Northwestern by two scores. The Buckeyes took the ball away thrice. It’s not a sure thing to be the difference-maker (and it’s worth mentioning here that the focus on Lawrence throwing interceptions was a bit misleading, since Ohio State’s thrived more forcing fumbles than grabbing picks this year), but the turnover battle’s been a big part of Ryan Day’s team making it this far. Wherever it lands tonight, it figures to be a big part of how far that team can go.
