O’s woes not limited to Pryor; OSU has bye week to regroup

October 29, 2008 at 12:00a.m.

The Buckeyes have three games remaining before their bowl game.

COLUMBUS (AP) — This figures to be a week of learning for No. 13 Ohio State.

No, not necessarily in the classroom. Not even in a football game.

Instead, the Buckeyes will have a bye week to do nothing but rehash Saturday night’s 13-6 loss to No. 3 Penn State that put a severe dent in any hopes of winning the Big Ten title or continuing as a national contender.

“You probably learn less in victory than you learn in defeat,” coach Jim Tressel said Tuesday on the Big Ten coaches conference call. “We’ll learn a lot about ourselves.”

The Buckeyes (7-2, 4-1) have three games remaining after Saturday’s day away. They play at Northwestern (6-2, 2-2), at Illinois (4-4, 2-3) and at home against Michigan (2-6, 1-3) before heading for a bowl game.

Ohio State will spend most of this week working on fundamentals and analyzing their mistakes before even taking a peek at the teams that lie ahead, though.

Things were pretty much going their way through three quarters against the Nittany Lions. They led 6-3 in the opening minutes of the fourth quarter and had the ball near midfield. Then the game, and a good part of their season, spiraled out of sight.

Freshman quarterback Terrelle Pryor, rather than just keep the ball for the 12 inches or so that were needed on third and less than a yard, decided to bounce outside right end in an attempt to get big yardage. His ill-advised move resulted in Mark Rubin punching the ball out of his hands, with Penn State’s Navorro Bowman recovering at the Ohio State 38.

Seven plays later, Penn State backup quarterback Pat Devlin did precisely what he was told to do on a sneak and scored from a foot out to give the Nittany Lions a 10-6 lead with 6:25 left.

Tressel said it was clear that Pryor should have just gotten the first down and then headed back to the huddle instead of trying to win the game by himself.

“For sure the best decision would have been to stay focused on really what we needed at the moment,” Tressel said. “What we needed at that moment was a first down, obviously.”

After Ohio State was forced to punt on its next possession, Devlin led the Lions downfield to set up Kevin Kelly’s 35-yard field goal for a 13-6 lead with 1:07 remaining.

Pryor completed two passes to Ray Small for 37 yards in a last-minute attempt to tie the game, but then he tried to hit Brian Hartline near the goal line and the underthrown ball was picked off by Penn State’s Lydell Sargeant in the end zone.

It was Tressel who made the decision to put a raw freshman in as his starting quarterback while benching sixth-year senior Todd Boeckman in the fourth game of the season. Tressel said in hindsight he wished Pryor would have run or thrown the ball away instead of making that final pass.

“We probably could have picked up about 15 yards and that would have been my first preference because then we would have been somewhere inside the 20 and maybe we had three shots at the end zone,” he said. “But certainly, you’d love to throw it away and live to see another play.”

This is not the first time that Ohio State has been ineffective on offense with the conservative Tressel calling the shots. In his 98 games as head coach, the Buckeyes have failed to score an offensive touchdown nine times.

Tressel made it clear that his entire offense — which has not produced a touchdown in three of the last seven games — was to blame instead of singling out Pryor or the offensive line.

“The inconsistency that we’ve had across the board — and not just up front, across the board — has lent itself to not being ecstatic about our offensive performance,” he said.