Ryan Day has said all year that Ohio State is working on making more big plays on special teams, but those efforts hadn’t yielded many results going into Saturday’s game against Purdue.
The Buckeyes still haven’t returned a punt or kickoff for a touchdown despite Day’s preseason guarantee that they would do so this year, and they haven’t forced any special teams turnovers to steal a possession. But they finally made a game-changing play in that phase of the game against the Boilermakers that got the train rolling toward the Buckeyes’ eventual 45-0 win.
With Purdue forced to punt from its own 13-yard line, Ohio State unveiled a new punt block formation that it had worked on during the week of practice.