Ohio State 11, Detroit 6

I wasn’t expecting a one-goal game like last year’s contest, but I also wasn’t expecting the Buckeyes to nearly double up what should be an improved Titans squad.

Although UDM kept the game close in the third quarter, Ohio State eventually took control and cruised to the win.

Tempo Free

From the official box score, a look at the tempo-free stats:

The Titans’ performance on faceoffs was significantly worse than last year’s outing against the Buckeyes (admittedly, on two pretty small sample sizes). You could say that was the story of the game, but UDM was juuust behind the Buckeyes in enough areas to make their overall performance much worse. At the end of the day, if you can’t possess the ball, you can’t win, and especially not mount a meaningful comeback.

They were god-awful on offense, for starters. The Buckeyes are a good defensive squad, to be fair, but the expectation going into this season was for a strong performance thanks to added firepower in the form of Joel Matthews. So far this season, we’ve seen sloppy play in spades, and not valuing the ball. It’s possible to blame early-season jitters, but the Titans had better snap out of it quickly.

On defense, they performed pretty well, although pretty much anything was an improvement over last weekend’s shellacking at the hands of Delaware (mitigating factors applied there, of course).

I haven’t included penalties in the tempo-free section, because the numbers don’t really take penalties into account. However, it seems – early in the year – that penalties will be a theme for this team. I understand that the Titans’ identity is predicated on aggressive play, but the reward is not worth the risk if you’re man-down 10 times a game.

Notes

Speaking of the man-down, Detroit allowed Ohio State to convert 4/10 opportunities with the advantage. On the other side, the Titans went 2/8 on the extra-man offense. That certainly sounds like a sloppily-played game on both sides, so take any criticism of Detroit’s discipline with a grain of salt.

Scott Harris’s move to midfield has led to more offensive production from that area of the field – and he looks like a natural on the invert, which you’d expect from an athletic converted attackman. The move looks to be permanent.

Shayne Adams had his worst game (at least fully-healthy game) in recent memory, scoring only one goal. Fortunately, the scoring will not be a one-man show this year, and the team offense, if and when it clicks, will be improved for that. Right now, the struggles look like basic concentration issues, and that will go away with more game under the team’s belt.

As mentioned above, the Titans committed a looooot of penalties in this game. The tradeoff? Four caused turnovers. This was a poor defensive performance, despite a better efficiency number than the Delaware game. Against the Blue Hens, fastbreak after fastbreak thanks to incompetency on faceoffs left the defense out to dry. This time, the faceoffs were far from great, but most Ohio State goals came in the settled offense.

Faceoffs. They have not improved. I predicted this. I was hoping that UDM would be a statistical anomaly and radically improve between seasons without much turnover in personnel, but it’s not to be, at least from early returns.

A.J. Levell was bad against Delaware (not all of which was his fault) and got immediately yanked. He showed in this game why he was the starter for all of last season. Hopefully this game was more indicative of his season-long performance than the opener. He let in a soft goal or two, but more often he was making a big play when his defense left him out to dry.

Early in the year, Detroit opponents are looking like offensive stars. This time around, it was Logan Schuss (4A, 2A) and Jesse King (3G, 1A) taking their star turn.

Elsewhere

Official Detroit recap. Official Ohio State recap. Ohio State-produced video highlights. You, too, can hear the worst sports announcing since “boom goes the dynamite.”

Up Next

Fortunately for Detroit, they’re playing an upstart team on Sunday, and that always provides an opportunity to break a losing streak. If they can’t beat Michigan… I may have radically overestimated this team, to be honest.

I’ve been derelict in my duties of previewing Michigan’s 2012 team, but I’ll try to pile several posts into tomorrow in time for Sunday’s biggest game in the history of the state (not joking).