Defense led by Shazier helps seal 52-22 victory over Illini

By JASON BOSTIC

It was a game where the sil­ver bul­lets, for the most part, played another lights out bat­tle, not let­ting the Illi­nois offense score until 53 sec­onds remained in the third quarter.

Only allow­ing 170 yards of total offense, they made sure that the Buck­eye offense had time to con­trol the clock, rack up the points, and boost the stats.

“I see a lot of hard coach­ing going on and that’s what I expect out of our staff,” said Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer about the defen­sive efforts.

It wasn’t just the fans that noticed the per­for­mance of the Buck­eyes defense, but the Big Ten in award­ing their hon­ors Mon­day morn­ing. Doubt­ful at the begin­ning of the year as they appeared slow and unable to con­trol the field, the last few weeks have been a com­plete 180 and they were rec­og­nized for the sec­ond week in a row.

The per­for­mance of sopho­more Ryan Shazier, who racked up 14 tack­les, includ­ing two for a loss to tie a career high in a sin­gle game earned him the Big Ten Defen­sive Player of the Week. He has had five games with dou­ble digit tack­les this sea­son and set a new career best with 11 solo tackles.

This is the sec­ond con­sec­u­tive week that Shazier has been hon­ored by the con­fer­ence, with him being the co-defensive player of the week last week. Head­ing into the final two games of the sea­son, he is two tack­les shy of becom­ing the first sopho­more since James Lau­ri­naitis in 2006 to top 100 tack­les in a sea­son. Shazier is cur­rently ranked third in the Big Ten and 23rd nationally.

Posted by Rob Hamilton on Nov 7 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.