Ohio State’s Elliott apologizes for critical comments

Ohio State’s athletic director Gene Smith said that it would have been better if the running back kept the critical comments in-house, but acknowledged that he had the right to express his opinions.

“We weren’t put in position to win this game”, Elliott said, referring to the mere 12 carries he was given against an average MI State defense that resulted in the end of his streak of 15 consecutive 100-yard rushing games.

Supremely talented and completely underused, he carried the ball just twice in the second half of Ohio State’s 17-14 loss to MI State. This year, the team started the season winning their first ten games, but that was before they ran into the MI State Spartans last Saturday. He said the junior running back, who announced following the game this is his past year at Ohio State, will not be punished or benched against the Wolverines.

Meyer said he agreed with Elliott’s criticism of Ohio State’s conservative play-calling, but was unhappy that he voiced the complaints to reporters.

“He came to see me, we had a very long discussion. “Body language, energy. You watch it, they just mope around when something bad happens”.

Ohio State went from a team talking repeat entering the season, to a dysfunctional offense that lost to a team without it’s starting quarterback, as players start publicly taking draft day with one more regular-season game to go.

Head coach Urban Meyer will likely address the comments behind closed doors, so Elliott’s playing time probably won’t be limited. “The one drive that we had where we kind of had some momentum when we scored after the strip sack, the plays we ran, we ran a lot of gap schemes and we were gashing them”.

“We’ve got to move on and it’s important for me as a leader to bring guys with me”, he said. Not many people get to play in this game and we’ve had four people in my family play in it. I don’t know what they were seeing.

“It hurts, it hurts a lot, just because of how we lost”. And I have to do better.

“Zeke has always been an extremely loyal person, a great competitor”, Meyer said. That’s not how you judge a team. And even though their season is not over with this loss, because a loss to number nine ranked MI State is not a bad loss in the eyes of the committee, some of the Ohio State players are acting like it is.

The Buckeyes need to beat MI and have MI State lose to Penn State to play for the Big Ten title and perhaps work their way back into the College Football Playoff. That’s not how you judge character.

“I didn’t want to pull a Jalen Watts-Jackson”, Geiger said, referring to his teammate who ended up with a broken hip after returning a botched punt for a touchdown to beat MI in October. No. 3 Ohio State is 10-1, and No. 12 MI is 9-2.