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Football
Buckeye Coaching Staff Busy Prior to Spring Ball
By John Porentas
After national signing day came and went last February, the OSU coaching staff did not exactly take a vacation. To the contrary, Jim Tressel and company hit the road hoping to find ways to make the Buckeyes a better football team in 2005.
"If February and March we not only went out and visited other people, but we also made an intense study of ourselves, because we've got to get better at certain areas, and figure out what was good for us and what wasn't good for us," said Tressel.
"Some of the defensive coaches went over to the University of Cincinnati and visited Coach Dantonio and his staff. Some of us went over to Virginia Tech and had some chances just to study the progression of the game," said Tressel.
"It's ever-changing. Things conceptually move forward all the time and a lot of our guys had a chance to go out and watch teams in spring practice and came back with some thoughts and ideas based on who we think we are."
Tressel and his coaches hit the road to visit other coaching staffs, but the selection of programs had little to do with socializing. The OSU staff was looking for advice on how to maximize the talent on the Ohio State roster. The key to making the decision as to where to visit was made easier this year by the mere fact that the Buckeye coaching staff knows a whole lot more about their team this year than they did last year at this time.
"We talked about who we were going to visit this year, and defensively they decided on Tennessee and the University of Cincinnati," said Tressel.
"Offensively we decided on LSU, Arkansas and Oklahoma.
"I think we made those decision knowing a little bit more about who we were.
"A year ago when we decided who we were going to study with, we had a little harder time, because we didn't know who we were. I'm not sure we knew who we were until the season progressed," Tressel said.
Once the coaching staff came to their conclusions on where OSU's talent strengths were, they made their decisions as to where to visit.
"Part of it is what people have done, part of it is who people have played against, part of it is things like Joe Daniels tells me that LSU from an offensive standpoint is amazingly similar to the way we deploy and attack and conceptualize. That's why we went to LSU. We know more about ourselves and we know more about where we'd like to go."
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