Came across this the other day.  Chad Peltier of landgrantholyland.com has concluded - "This Year's Ohio State Football Team Will be the Most Talented Overall Team in Years". 

There's been some debate on a few threads here at 11W lately about how realistic it actually is to expect a championship-level performance from this season's team. 

Often, the attitude is that expectations should be kept in check due to the relative lack of experience on this year's squad.  And that no program could possibly lose so many players to the NFL draft and expect to be nearly as good the following year. 

Well, Peltier addresses that in his summary: 

As the overall talent base improves, consistency becomes easier to predict -- which is why anything less than a top-ten F/+ finish would be a surprise, despite heavy personnel losses to the NFL.

The numbers Peltier's system provides serve to confirm the optimism some 11Wers have had about this team's propects. 

He also supports the thinking that the new starters who have been in the system for a couple of years will probably perform at a high level - provided the talent is there, of course:

I've also added two new columns, which use a rolling weighted average that favor experience and seniority, discounting the impact of younger recruiting classes. The idea was to get a sense for how much talent is ready to play, in that more time in the system theoretically should mean more effectiveness -- and that freshmen rarely start at Ohio State.

It's probably safe to assume this is even more the case with a Meyer/Marotti-led program than in a more typical situation. 

As he usually does, Peltier gives a fairly simple expanation of how he arrived at his conclusions.  It's a worthwhile little read -