The Tim 10: Ranking Ohio State Cornerbacks Coach Tim Walton's 10 Best Bars From His 2024 Raps

By Andy Anders on July 11, 2025 at 11:10 am
Tim Walton
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Tim Walton’s got more golden bars than Fort Knox.

Ohio State’s cornerbacks coach is the team’s supreme freestyler; his rhyme schemes hit clean like Deontay Wilder.

Since Walton’s arrival to coach his alma mater in 2022, he’s routinely penned four-line spoken-word rap sessions to share with the Ohio State defense, the DNA of each packed with power for his players, poison for their doubters, pain for their opponents and joy to get to work. (That’s a Kendrick Lamar reference for the uninitiated.) His cornerbacks have responded in kind by anchoring a top-three passing defense in college football each of the last two years.

As Eleven Warriors’ resident rap aficionado, I’m here to present what I’m calling the Tim 10: Tim Walton’s 10 best bars of 2024. Great art doesn’t require elaboration, and Walton’s is no exception; however, I’ll lay out what I think separates his best work from the rest. Now, before the mic cools off after he set it ablaze:

10. “The journey is long from beginning to end; November we start ballin’, so we must be all in” – Nov. 1

November is what separates wheat from chaff in college football, and Walton rang in that month for the Buckeyes by spelling out its importance with the punchline “be all in.” The flow and delivery of each of his lines in the clip are on point, too. Ohio State’s defense balled out in Happy Valley the next day, propelling the Buckeyes to a 20-13 road win over No. 3 Penn State.

9. “Scars on our body only show you that we’ve healed; I think where we came from, it’s hard not to get the chills” – Jan. 18

Scars and scar tissue were a theme of a 2024 Ohio State squad loaded with seniors, and specific wording that Ryan Day himself referenced several times. It was a class that saw four consecutive losses to Michigan and a one-point loss in the College Football Playoff semifinals to eventual 2022 national champion Georgia. A gut-wrenching 14-3 loss to Missouri in the 2023 Cotton Bowl added another wound. 

A turn of phrase to turn those old wounds into a point of pride is poetry. I also enjoyed the way Walton slanted chills (cheeells) to form a fun rhyme with healed. He closed this rap session with another strong bar:

It’s hard not to believe after all we done achieved 

When you’re making your own movie, they can’t cut you out the scene

8. “Handshakes from the fakes but their motives be malicious; didn’t need the pandemic for me to keep my distance” – Dec. 13

Walton wedges bits of wisdom into his words, too. While many of these lines are pulled from his “Free Game Friday” writings, he’d often come out with some more thought-provoking messages on “Thoughtful Thursdays.” Some were raps, some were just well-constructed speeches with life lessons.

Here, on a Free Game Friday, the message is simple: Surround yourself with people who have your best interests at heart. And a COVID-19 bar still hit hard in 2024. It still hits hard in 2025.

7. “Gave the food for thought you gave me, used it as nourishment; and all the negative chatter, I used that shit as encouragement” – Nov. 15 

I want to emphasize those three words at the end of the post: Off the dome. Walton is spitting these lines and rhymes off the top of his head. Walton prefaces this line by saying some doubt his rap abilities.

Some guys are questioning my skills and use of words 

So I’m gonna spit this one off the dome, see if this some shit you ever heard

Three-syllable rhymes take technique to make work. Making up his prose on the spot, Walton pairs refurbished with repurposed and nourishment with encouragement. The latter couplet is my favorite of the sequence. The turn of phrase with “food for thought” is clever as hell, and he put a stamp on it with a bacon-crisp delivery of encouragement. The crowd of Silver Bullets responded with appropriate Mmms.

6. “They doing a lot of talking but the game is played on the grass; they mouth just wrote a check that their ass can’t cash” – Nov. 22

The bold personality of Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti clearly struck a chord with the Ohio State locker room. Cignetti famously said, “Purdue sucks. But so does Michigan and Ohio State” at halftime of a home Indiana basketball game after being hired in December 2023, and said recruits should “Google me” in one of his first press conferences.

The Buckeyes reminded the No. 10 Hoosiers of their place in the Big Ten with a 38-15 shelling in the Shoe on Nov. 23. Ohio State quarterback Will Howard spat his own bar back at Cignetti on the field afterward.

5. “Like JT said, they think we the Buckeyes of the past; now we done put two and two together, we got something four they ass” – Oct. 11

This line was so good it was worth a top-five listing, even if the Ducks won 32-31 at home over the Buckeyes the next day. “Put two and two together, we got something four they ass.” Magnificent. Plus, Ohio State got the upper hand on Oregon when it mattered most, in the CFP quarterfinals at the Rose Bowl. 

4. “Listen to what I say and be sure you don’t miss this; because after the game, we want them all you can eat biscuits” – Sept. 20

This line, said before Ohio State played Marshall, is simply the funniest of the Tim 10 when taken in context. The context:

3. “People came at us wrong because they thought this team was weak; they didn’t know our heart and realize we wouldn’t skip a beat” – Jan. 19

Poignant words from Walton the day before the national championship game. Ohio State proved its heart throughout the season, and it kept beating on to college football’s ultimate crown. Another good line:

Didn’t let the noise or adversity dim our light

The bumps of the journey was just turbulence for the flight

2. “Feed your mind and soul properly, that’s what I forgot to mention; what good is a plate when you starving for attention?” – Dec. 27

Of the many pearls of wisdom scattered throughout Walton’s rhymes, this was my favorite. “What good is a plate when you starving for attention?” This entire epithet is a great reminder of where we should get our worth and purpose from, not the outside world or social media, but from within, as Walton says.

Shutting out the outside noise was especially important at this point of the season for Ohio State, which was fresh off an emphatic first-round CFP win over Tennessee and preparing to fly to California to rematch Oregon in the Rose Bowl.

1. “We in the playoffs now, regular season long gone; tell whoever counted us out, they did their math wrong” – Dec. 19

There’s no simpler action in mathematics than counting, which made this my favorite Walton wordplay of them all. And it proved prophetic for Ohio State.

Many people were counting the Buckeyes out after the Michigan debacle closed the regular season. I was among the doubters. I certainly didn’t pick them to win a national title entering the CFP. The slant rhyme of gone and wrong is the icing on top of Walton’s perfect cake.

Maybe we all need to retake first-grade arithmetic. 

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