Oregon coach Dan Lanning had a little joke this week about slowing down Jeremiah Smith.
“We’re gonna see if we can play with 12 (players),” Lanning said.
Maybe he was kidding. Maybe not. When a receiver is drawing that much attention, it can start to feel like the defense is sending extra bodies anyway.
Smith heads into Saturday’s game against Oregon ranked fifth nationally or better in receptions (62), receiving yards (1,067) and receiving touchdowns (13). He’s done that while seeing the kind of coverage that turns every route into a wrestling match. The strange part is that he has not drawn a single pass interference penalty this season, which leaves him tied for dead last in that category.
The last time a PI flag went his way was during last year’s Week 11 win against Purdue. Since then, defenders have either been getting away with plenty or officials have decided Smith’s size makes the contact look less obvious than it is.
That was on display in Ohio State’s 19-15 win over Indiana last month. On one deep route in the second quarter, Smith was running through the play while Indiana safety Preston Zachman closed in. Julian Sayin’s pass hung long enough for Zachman to catch up, and Zachman slammed Smith to the ground without making a play on the ball.
Ohio State coach Ryan Day pointed to that kind of contact the next week.
“A tug or a pull or a bump on Jeremiah based on almost anybody else in the country would look a lot different,” Day said then. “So a foul is a foul.
They call it the LeBron rule, the Shaq rule, whatever that was when it was in the NBA; I think we’ve got to recognize those types of things. So that’s all being communicated.”
The bigger point is that this is hardly a new story. Long before Smith was dealing with it in college, Michael Jordan was dealing with something similar in the NBA.
In the late 80s, former Pistons coach Chuck Daly built the famous “Jordan Rules” around one goal: make Jordan miserable. Daly once explained to Sports Illustrated that Detroit doubled Jordan whenever he touched the ball.
If he cut or dribbled past his defender, Daly told the Pistons to “nail him.” It worked.
Detroit beat the Bulls in three straight playoff series from 1988 to 1990.
Jordan later said that physical approach got to him.
“... I was beat down because of the physicality of what was happening within the game,” Jordan told Ahmad Rashad in 2020. “And I didn’t have it to compete with them.
“That’s when I started to physically build my body up and gear myself up for that type of beating. From that year on, I got stronger and stronger and stronger because that became as important as anything else.”
Jordan hired personal trainer Tim Grover in 1989, and over the next two summers he turned himself into a harder player to knock around. Former Bulls forward Jud Buechler later said Jordan became nearly impossible to move off balance.
“He had this natural strength,” Buechler said. “Especially his core. From the waist down, he was a rock.”
Former Bulls center Will Perdue said Jordan also changed how he handled the aftermath of contact.
“He felt it was giving that person [who fouled him] too much credit,” Perdue said. “It was part of the mental game for him. He never wanted anyone to think any of it got to him.”
B.J. Armstrong said Jordan’s game evolved with his body.
“The Jordan Rules worked as long as Michael played a traditional way,” Armstrong told Bleacher Report. “But he made an adjustment.
… He figured out he had to catch the ball in position to score. So he learned to operate from the post and on the weak side and play the game with three dribbles or less.
Now when he caught it, because his footwork was so good, he could score in a multitude of ways. He was skilled enough to adapt to any situation.”
Jordan eventually broke through in 1991, winning his first championship that same year. He went on to win five more titles over the next decade while losing just one playoff series.
Smith is not there yet, obviously, but the parallels are hard to miss. The more defenses crowd him, the more he has to adjust.
One of the biggest changes has been where he lines up. Smith is playing a career-high 12.4 snaps per game from the slot, which gives Ohio State more ways to move him around and makes it tougher for defenses to stack help his way. He’s also been willing to serve as a decoy, opening space for teammates and forcing defenses out of some of those double teams.
And every time a defender gets physical with him, that’s another rep for Smith to learn from.
Could he complain more to officials? Sure.
But Ohio State has already seen how that can go. Day sent several plays from the Indiana game to the Big Ten for review, and the calls still didn’t come.
So the burden shifts back to Smith. The refs can’t solve it for him.
The defense keeps testing the line. And like Jordan before him, Smith is being pushed into finding another way through it.
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