Ohio State defeated the No. 1 team in the country on Saturday and only accumulated 203 yards of total offense.
Jeremiah Smith and Max Klare had uncharacteristic drops early. While the running game had its highlight moments, it also struggled to find consistency against Texas’ vaunted defensive front. Julian Sayin, to his credit, kept his poise, managed the game efficiently in his first start and didn’t turn the ball over, but it was clear the game plan had training wheels on it. Ryan Day admitted after the game that he and offensive coordinator Brian Hartline called a conservative game plan offensively once they saw how dominant their defense was holding up against Arch Manning, the No. 1 overall player in the 2023 recruiting class, but when all was said and done Sayin probably could have handled more than he was asked to do on Saturday.
“I thought Brian called an unselfish game,” Day said Saturday. “I thought the defense was playing well … We wanted to let them beat us. And for a first-time starter, you just don't want to put (Julian) in that situation. So hindsight says we did the right thing, but you're never too sure.”
Frankly, all of that is fair. And honestly, it’s pretty exciting if you think about it.
If the Buckeyes can already take down what was supposed to be the nation’s best team with their offense not firing on all cylinders quite yet, how dangerous can this team be once it reaches its final form? Smith isn’t going to drop passes like that every week — if you remember, he also dropped one in the season opener against Akron last year, too, and then didn’t drop another pass for the rest of the season. C.J. Stroud and Justin Fields didn’t look like finished products in their first career starts against premier opponents, and it’s safe to say Sayin’s stat lines are only going to get better from here.
“I was just going out there and focusing on my job,” Sayin said. “I think the defense played really well, obviously, and then the offensive line and the receivers and the running backs ran hard. So it kind of made my job easy just trying to distribute the ball.”
Ohio State already has a championship-caliber defense; it proved that on Saturday. Defensive coordinator Matt Patricia put Manning in a blender all day – a sentence that was last uttered sometime between 2016 and 2017 – and he disguised coverages and formations well all day. Caleb Downs continued to be a superstar and Arvell Reese sure seems like he’s well on his way to becoming one. Perhaps at least a small part of OSU’s success defensively can be attributed to nerves/ineffectiveness from the mega-hyped younger Manning. Regardless, if you asked the question, “Does Ohio State have a legitimate chance of repeating in 2025,” the defense responded with a resounding “yes.”
The big-picture talk will sort itself out eventually as it always does, but following a statement win against the No. 1 team in the country, it’s hard not to dream a little bit about what could be. At a minimum, this team’s floor seems to be another College Football Playoff berth, with challenging matchups against Washington, Illinois, Penn State and Michigan still remaining.
But if the offense matches the level of play its defense provided today? The ceiling is unlimited.
