A year after winning a national championship, Ohio State caved under pressure by seeing its winning streak snapped in 2015. Star defensive lineman Joey Bosa said the Buckeyes were mentally drained as they attempted to keep their 23-game winning streak alive before Michigan State finally brought the streak to an end in the next-to-last week of the regular season.
“It just seems like nothing you do is ever good enough unless you’re beating teams by 50 points,” Bosa said Wednesday in a story published by ESPN.com. “You win by 20 and it was a bad week. That was definitely a struggle for us, because you never feel like you’re good enough. It’s hard when your own fan base is getting after you for being, what, 10-0? And they still weren’t happy. We won [23] games in a row.”
Ohio State was the consensus number one team in the preseason polls, which was to be expected following a national championship and no players leaving early for the NFL Draft, a three-headed quarterback battle and running back Ezekiel Elliott back on offense and Bosa and others back on defense. Ohio State was expected to blitz through the majority of the game son their schedule, but many of the wins showed some cracks in the Buckeyes along the way in somewhat similar pattern shown by Florida State the previous season. Unlike the 2014 Seminoles though, Ohio State was unable to escape the regular season without a blemish, although they never trailed at any point during a game (Michigan State’s victory came on a field goal as time expired), so there should be something to be said for that feat.
“That week was rough,” Bosa said. “It was rough for me, it was rough for Coach [Urban] Meyer. You could just tell it was draining, that loss. It killed a lot of us.”
Ohio State rebounded with a road win against rival Michigan the next week, in what was probably the best game of the season for the Buckeyes since the season-opener against Virginia Tech. Bosa and the Buckeyes look to finish out the season with a victory in a bowl game that has a storied history for the program, the Fiesta Bowl. Ohio State takes on Notre Dame on January 1.