How Ohio State football built a veteran-laden roster to propel championship run
ATLANTA — When Ohio State won the first College Football Playoff a decade ago, underclassmen pushed it through the postseason.
Sophomores, led by Joey Bosa and Ezekiel Elliott, helped the Buckeyes to lift the gold trophy.
But if the Buckeyes return to the pinnacle of the sport on Monday night, the triumph will be owed to the prevalence of upperclassmen.
All but five players who are in line to start in the national championship game against Notre Dame are juniors and seniors.
“This is by far the most veteran team we've ever had,” said Mark Pantoni, the Buckeyes’ general manager of player personnel.
No one has as much familiarity with their makeup as Pantoni, who first arrived at the school in 2012 to lead the recruiting operations under former coach Urban Meyer.
Pantoni helped construct the roster that has the Buckeyes on the verge of another title, and he pointed to its combined experience as a key factor in propelling them to this stage.
“They’re grown men,” Pantoni said. “They’re pros. It’s not just what you see on the field, but all the details that go into the weekly preparation, film study and taking care of their bodies. They know what it takes.”
Experience could be more valuable than ever in the era of the expanded playoff. The introduction of a 12-team format added two more rounds to the postseason and left championship contenders to push deeper into January.
The Buckeyes will play 16 games in a season for the first time, navigating an unprecedented stretch of schedule.
Along their postseason run, coach Ryan Day said the Buckeyes have benefited from the maturity of their nucleus.
“Physical maturity to be able to withstand the length of the season,” Day said, “mental maturity to be able to wipe the slate clean on a week-to-week basis and start a new game plan and emotional maturity of handling the ups and downs. Certainly, we know we've had a few of those this year.”
A special confluence of factors afforded them the opportunity to build a veteran-laden roster, retaining players who remained motivated to capture the ultimate prize. For a handful, their collegiate eligibility was extended as a ripple effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. Increased funding for name, image and likeness opportunities offered more financial security as well.
While they supplemented a few positions of need through the transfer portal, including adding starting quarterback Will Howard and star safety Caleb Downs, the core of the roster is the result of retention. The set of circumstances could ultimately push the Buckeyes over the top.
A push begins for Ohio State
Jack Sawyer started with a text message.
It was 13 months ago as the defensive end from Pickerington contemplated whether to remain at Ohio State for his senior year or leave early for the NFL.
Once Sawyer had made up his mind, settling on a return before the Buckeyes appeared in the Cotton Bowl, he wanted to fill in teammates who were wrestling with a similar decision.
“Let’s think about this for a while,” Sawyer said. “We've got some time.”
That group chat laid the groundwork for the Buckeyes to retain a tight-knit group of juniors. In the span of a few weeks last winter, nearly a dozen of them opted to stay in school, ranging from running back TreVeyon Henderson and wide receiver Emeka Egbuka to a horde of defenders.
Persuading them to return, Sawyer reprised a familiar role for teammates. He had once helped convince them to pick Ohio State as decorated high school prospects, forming the nation’s second-ranked class in 2021.
“He recruited everyone to come back,” senior cornerback Jordan Hancock said.
It was a convincing appeal. Sawyer bottles an infectious energy, which spearheaded the movement.
“Jack is definitely one person that can get everyone on a boat,” Hancock added.
Superstar wide receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. and defensive tackle Mike Hall Jr. became the only Buckeyes to forgo their senior seasons to declare for the draft.
In Sawyer’s mind, their closeness kept them together. He remembers a late-night call from offensive lineman Donovan Jackson, not long before the declaration deadline in which he confessed he planned to leave.
But early the following morning, Sawyer received a return call from Jackson.
“He’s crying,” Sawyer recalls, “and he’s like, ‘I’m coming back.’”
Sawyer was overwhelmed by Jackson’s change of heart.
“He’s like, ‘Yeah, I prayed about it with my family; I can’t leave you guys behind,”’ Sawyer said. “That shows you the love that we have for each other to go to chase something like we have on Monday night.”
Money matters
Had senior cornerback Denzel Burke been making a draft decision five years ago, he would have faced a different calculus.
Player compensation was restricted. It was only as recently as 2021 that the NCAA began allowing athletes to profit off endorsement deals.
Those who held off turning pro would forfeit hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, in potential earnings from a salary and signing bonus.
“If it was that case,” Burke said, “I would have been in the NFL.”
The NIL resources surrounding Ohio State are vast. Players earned a combined $20 million in deals last year, according to athletic director Ross Bjork.
The money flows from marketing deals with companies and two booster collectives supporting the Buckeyes.
To keep a bevy of seniors in school, Day took an active role in raising funds for the collectives last winter, making phone calls and scheduling meetings with prospective donors.
“He worked tirelessly at that,” Pantoni said.
The push made sense. The upperclassmen were proven commodities, having spent several seasons as starters. The staff knew their impact.
Pantoni equated the investment to signing players in the NFL to their second contract.
“They earned that big money,” Pantoni said. “You hope to keep them on their rookie contracts until they’ve performed on the field.”
The prospect of NIL deals reduced the risk of players putting off leaving for the NFL.
“We were able to make it where they didn’t have to worry as much about the financial part of it,” said Brian Schottenstein, a Columbus real estate executive who co-founded THE Foundation, one of the two affiliated collectives. “We could level the playing field so to speak and ultimately they could come back to win the national championship that is right in front of us.”
Players acknowledged compensation as a factor in their decisions. A return to school did not result in a massive financial loss, a contrast to previous years in which they could receive only a scholarship and stipend to cover basic living expenses.
“Knowing you’re going to be compensated for how you produce on the field, it’s better than nothing,” senior defensive tackle Tyleik Williams said. “I wouldn’t say it changed my whole decision, but it definitely did sway things.”
They also maintained the pull to stay together in pursuit of a championship might have been irresistible.
“I feel like 10 years ago we all would have come back too,” Hancock said, “because we had goals that we wanted to hit.”
Experience materializes for Ohio State
Ohio State’s volume of experience is most evident on the defensive side of the ball.
Eight of the 11 starters are seniors, from terrorizing pass rushers Sawyer and J.T. Tuimoloau to ball-hawking safety Lathan Ransom. Add in juniors Sonny Styles (linebacker) and Davison Igbinosun (cornerback), and 10 upperclassmen have made a combined 313 starts for the Buckeyes since 2021.
Downs, the sophomore All-American safety who transferred from Alabama last January, is the only underclassman to start for the defense.
“You can compare it to a high school basketball team that played AAU growing up,” Hancock said. “We know the defense and we have chemistry with each other. It makes it beautiful.”
Their years together overlapped with the arrival of Jim Knowles, who was hired as the defensive coordinator in 2022.
Knowles sees the familiarity as invaluable.
“I don't think you can really quantify it,” Knowles said. “It’s amazing. Everywhere I've ever been, when you get in the system and you learn it and you can see what's happening before it happens or why I'm calling things, it pays off in dividends.”
The Buckeyes lead the Football Bowl Subdivision in both scoring defense (12.2 points per game) and total defense (251.1 yards per game).
During their playoff run, they have only once allowed more than two touchdowns in a game, holding three top-10 teams to an average of 17 points per game.
“It's a veteran group I trust completely,” Knowles said.
Their background has allowed Knowles to make adjustments over the course of the season, reconfiguring personnel alignments or increasing their blitz frequency as he did in the aftermath of a loss to Oregon in October.
Since November, the Buckeyes have often lined up Hancock, the nickel back, as a safety in the deeper part of the field, allowing them to reposition Downs closer to the line of scrimmage.
Hancock reasons the changes they made on the fly would have not been possible when they were first learning Knowles’ system as sophomores.
“It was too much stuff we didn’t know,” Hancock said.
Over a lengthy season that has required the Buckeyes to respond to adversity, intangible qualities have helped them as well.
After reaching a low point in a stunning upset loss to archrival Michigan at the end of the regular season, an ugly scene that saw a postgame brawl at midfield of Ohio Stadium, they rallied, carrying a resolve as they marched through the bracket.
“You have a bunch of guys who have been through a bunch of junk together,” said Kirk Herbstreit, a former Ohio State quarterback and longtime analyst for ESPN.
“When they got through the Michigan game, they all got together and said, ‘We've got one more run at this thing. We’ve been together a lot. Let’s go get this. We have four games to go.’ That’s been their mission. They would have had a much tougher time without having all those seniors.”
As a final round beckons at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the Buckeyes remain composed, hardened by the experiences together.
“We’ve done this before,” Jackson said. “The newness and awe are gone. Obviously, it’s a huge game you dream of being in, but at the end of the day, it’s 60 minutes of football and you’re playing it with your best friends.”
Joey Kaufman covers Ohio State football for The Columbus Dispatch. Follow him on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, @joeyrkaufman or email him at jkaufman@dispatch.com.