Urban Meyer’s 3 worst losses ever have come in 3 straight years

Ohio State’s an elite program. But once a year, for the last three years, they’ve played like the exact opposite. Urban Meyer’s still only lost nine times as head coach of the Buckeyes, but the Ls are becoming drastic.

It’s not necessarily to say Meyer’s lost his touch, or that the Buckeyes aren’t a heavyweight. It is to say that damn, it’s kinda weird that the Buckeyes keep getting straight dumptrucked when they lose.

So, let’s take a quick trip back down memory lane.

The Buckeyes were a 13.5-point favorite on the road coming in. Purdue coach Jeff Brohm didn’t have a signature win ... and then the Buckeyes went to West Lafayette on a Saturday night. Ohio State never led, and every time they’d threaten, the Boilermakers would answer.

The exclamation point was a pick-six near the end, but they never really clicked, and Purdue just absolutely landed haymakers coming home to finish things off.

Purdue scored 35 points in the second half, including four touchdowns in a row from beyond 40 yards, one of which came on an interception return. Other numbers:

-Purdue averaged 7.5 yards per play to Ohio State’s 5.6

-Ohio State QB Dwayne Haskins threw 72 passes, for just a 127.5 rating.

-Purdue receiver Rondale Moore, a true freshman star, had 170 yards and two touchdowns on 12 catches.

-Ohio State, with its blue-chip offensive line and running backs, ran for 3 yards per carry against what had been the country’s No. 81 defense by yards per play.

But getting worked in a Flyover State with an inspirational fan story and a crowd doing a black out isn’t something new to Ohio State, because ...

As the Iowa Children’s Hospital patients looked down from above, and the Hawkeyes crowd was clad in black, Kirk Ferentz’s bunch wiped Ohio State out of the Playoff with an early-November beatdown as a 20.5-point underdog.

But this loss wasn’t what you’d call a complete blowout. It was more of the lightning in a bottle variety.

J.T. Barrett threw four picks in this game, giving him five on the entire year. The first was a pick-six that put the Buckeyes in an immediate 7-0 upset alert. The next came just before the half and gave the Hawkeyes a short field that they traversed to make it 31-17 going into the locker room.

But lightning did indeed strike the Buckeyes, and the burn was scorching.

The Buckeyes scraped their way into the Playoff with two overtime victories and a regular season loss by three points. When they got there, what they met was an eventual national champion that absolutely took them apart.

While there are questions about how good Purdue really is, and the Iowa loss was at least kinda flukey due to turnovers, the Clemson Fiesta Bowl loss was not that:

Saturday brought the worst loss for an Urban Meyer-coached team since Alabama’s 32-13 win against Meyer’s Florida in the 2009 SEC Championship Game. It was Ohio State’s worst loss in a while, too. Meyer’s now been in Columbus for five seasons, and he’s lost a total of six games. Two of those have come against Clemson, with the first being an Orange Bowl loss to close the 2013 season.

The Buckeyes hadn’t been shut out since a 1993 game against Michigan. Meyer had never been shut out in his head coaching career, over 15 seasons

The Buckeyes can still make the Playoff in 2018, and the Big Ten is still there for the taking even though tough opponents like Michigan and Michigan State still lie ahead.

But we’ll see what blowouts 2019 may bring the Buckeyes.