Ohio State beat Northwestern 28-19 on Saturday. If the final score is all you're looking at, you're missing the game. This was a team favored by double digits, against a Northwestern squad down to its backup quarterback, and it still needed a muffed punt to turn a tight fourth quarter into a comfortable one. This program got away with something.
The final margin is doing a lot of work it didn't earn. Ohio State entered the day among the lowest-ranked versions of itself the CFP committee has ever produced, fighting to stay alive in a playoff race crowded with three-loss teams, the kind of spot where the committee needs to see something impressive. Northwestern was playing without its starting quarterback for a second straight week, with a transfer making just his second career start under center. That's about as favorable a setup as a shorthanded, fading Big Ten contender could ask for, and Ohio State still needed a gift from special teams, a Wildcats punt muffed at their own 10-yard line, to push the margin from uncomfortable to safe. Take that away and you're staring at a one-score escape against a backup-quarterback Northwestern team that had nothing to lose.
The defense deserves the blame here. Luke Fahey and Jeremiah Smith don't. Fahey, a true freshman thrust into the starting job while Julian Sayin recovers from a shoulder injury with no firm return timeline, threw for a clean, efficient day with multiple touchdowns. He didn't blink against a defense with nothing left to lose. Smith turned in one of the great individual days in Big Ten history, breaking the conference's career receiving yardage record and tying the mark for 100-yard games, all in his third season on campus. Both of those are real, and both deserve to be separated from the question of whether this team is heading the right direction. The defense let a backup-led offense hang around into the fourth quarter and then let it score again as time expired. The final margin looked closer than it should have been, and that falls on the defense, not on Fahey or Smith.
A win is a win, and the season isn't in crisis. Ohio State is still alive for the Big Ten and the playoff, and alive beats the alternative. But being alive and being fixed are two different things, and the committee isn't grading on a curve for effort. Teams climbing from the bottom of the playoff picture look like they belong there. Ohio State needed a fumbled punt to put away a backup quarterback it was favored to beat by double digits instead. It looked like a team one bad defensive series away from missing the playoff entirely.
Next week at Nebraska is going to tell the real story, and the defense that let a shorthanded Northwestern team hang around all afternoon needs to show up looking nothing like it did this weekend. If it doesn't, nobody will be arguing about whether this result was worrying. They'll already know.
