A Pilgrimage to Eternity

For years, it was a hard G for me. Graphical Interchange Format is the government name for those little animated things, and graphical begins with a hard G. Logic (soft G in the middle that word) suggests (two soft Gs) GIF's pronunciation goes harder than Jeremiah Smith (J always sounds like J, with apologies to Latinos and Spaniards).

I argued on behalf of hard G against the soft G faction for years. GIF could not possibly sound exactly like the peanut butter of my youth, which was also the stage name for a band I saw play several times in college - Jif and the Choosy Mothers, marvelous band name - because it just couldn't. It's not Jraphical, it's Graphical.

Jif and GIF couldn't sound the same. But then a dozen years ago, the guy who invented the GIF went on the record and announced his baby's name is pronounced with a soft G. Debate, over.

Jif immediately got to work and produced a limited-edition run of GIF peanut butter. You haven't participated in a hard G vs. soft G debate since 2013 for a reason. Everything changed overnight.

Overnight in college football parlance is roughly two seasons. Here are the past five.

The term Super Sophs is meaningful to Ohio State fans, for 1968 and 2014 reasons. Based on what has happened to college football overnight, it's likely a term relegated to history.

Georgia SE Adonai Mitchell, TE Brock Bowers, FS Malaki Starks and Ohio State X Jeremiah Smith are the four first-year college players to have started for national championship winners since the pandemic.

The Indiana Hoosiers had as many 6th year college players starting in 2025 as the total number of true freshmen starters over the past five CFP winners, combined. Sturdy old guys are easier to come by than reliable young aliens. JJ is the only true freshman of the past three seasons, in case you still weren't grasping how special he is.

Second and third-year players have seen their participation diminish quickly. So think about how this impacts what we used to obsess over in late January as we entered the throes of college football withdrawal. Consider what this web site's content looked like a decade ago, right now.

It would be dominated by recruiting news in the buildup to Signing Day, which was always that first Wednesday in February, a holiday for fax machines celebrating their battle to stave off extinction simply so Letters of Intent could be delivered with their original signatures intact.

But then in 2017, the early signing period was introduced and players began signing their names in December. A year later the Transfer Portal was born. The National Letter of Intent program was scrapped in 2024, and earlier this month 31 members of the 2025 Ohio State football team entered the portal.

T h i r t y - o n e from a playoff team with a stable head coach from the nation's premier conference! A blueblood and dream destination for innumerable players with NFL aspirations. Among the 31 departees are future stars, some serviceable guys and a handful of You're Not Going to Play Here projects that in any other era would have likely become program players and contributors.

Senior Brandon Inniss will be a returning captain and fourth-year player for the 2026 Buckeyes. © Rick Osentoski-Imagn Images

The Buckeyes only signed 28 high school players in December (<-- that link says 27 because it doesn't include Legend Bey) which was one of their biggest classes ever...a month before more than that many guys decided to leave a program which will enter yet another season in the top five nationally this fall.

Think about how abruptly the GIF vs. JIF debate ended. Recruiting class rankings and stars were for decades the backbone of future success predictability. Ohio State's 26--man 2025 class ranked 4th nationally. A sizeable chunk of it is already in the portal.

Nearly everything you tracked, followed and believed about the college football offseason a mere decade ago is now antiquated or extinct. Nineteen of those guys in the portal were freshmen or sophomores with most having significant opportunities for playing time this fall.

A decade ago, Warren Ball, Grant Schmidt and Evan Lisle transferred to lower-shelf football programs to further their playing days. Guys who weren't going to play at Ohio State because they weren't good enough to make the rotation in Columbus even if they devised a pre-pandemic scheme to stay in college six years.

Three guys. That's 28 fewer than what just left. Buckeye football kept getting older but the rosters for the better part of the past 100 seasons stayed roughly the same age.

High school recruiting was an eight-month spectator sport going back to the days that Buckeye Sports Bulletin arrived in mailboxes and left ink smudges on your fingertips. In a matter of months, every FBS program abruptly realized that winning games of significance means getting older, immediately.

That will relegate - not eliminate - high school scouting resources to college player surveillance - not tampering - which is a derisked player acquisition exercise where coaches can eliminate homesickness, high school girlfriends, nagging 10th grade injuries and garden variety teenager problems from their red flag list.

Sturdy old guys are easier to come by than reliable young aliens. GET OLDER OR EMBRACE COMING UP SHORT.

Roster composition won't be the only thing that changes. Coordinators will have their duties distilled to philosophy, scheme and operations - they will shed or reduce some of their traditional tasks which accompanied amateurism like visiting high schools.

That 2021 season where that chart above begins had Ohio State with a first-time coordinator at DC known predominantly for his recruiting ability and an emeritus OC who had co-led the offense with Ryan Day while also leading the TE room and shadowing other offensive staffers.

Entering 2026, Day has head coaches on both sides of the ball - and it's unlikely OC Arthur Smith will be among the coaches counted as off-campus recruiters. This will be the second time in his Ohio State tenure that the head coach won't have to devote significant time and energy to managing and developing an inexperienced play caller.

The first time can be seen on the chart above, as 2024. The model began when that graduating class decided to stick around long enough to exhaust its eligibility while Day phoned in a favor from his college coach and mentor.

That model is now the scaffold for sustaining the game's only recession-proof program. The only significant elements the Buckeyes still need to implement in their evolution to a Junior NFL Franchise are shedding their radically unserious approach to special teams and replacing the slit film turf the NFLPA is proposing be permanently banned.

Other than that, the rest are just details - e.g. personnel groupings, allowing quarterbacks to run, rotating more players in, varying the pace of play; it's a long offseason, we don't have to talk about everything all at once - maintenance and fundraising. Ohio State football's big structural pieces are nearly all in place.

RELATED Senior Year (2024)

It would not be generous (soft G, unless you're certifiable) to credit Day with growing into his role as a first-time head coach as he accumulates lessons learned. The debate over his worthiness for the role has moved toward the fringes as he's adjusted and corrected his oversights and bad bets.

And that's bad news for discourse. If every point of contention for the program is addressed by its stewards, fans will be left with no choice but to enjoy football games and admire the operation. If you're old enough to remember the Buckeyes 14-0 BCS Title 2002 season - absolutely torturous from September, onward - you know this is sarcasm.

Perfect isn't good enough, because perfect is temporary. The pilgrimage to eternity keeps perfection aspirational, and today that means the guys you cheer on every fall are going to grow up...in a jiffy. You don't have to like it, but you should know how to pronounce it.