The NFL Combine was a healthy dose of confirmation bias.
Everything that transpired in Indy over the weekend simply reinforced what you've either heard, read or said yourself for weeks. How did the Buckeyes lose back-to-back games to end its season with these guys on the team?
This is the type of angst that can consume you forever, like all of those other seasons piled up in Ohio State's reviled Squandered Season cabinet that leak out every offseason. So let's bury 2025. A righteous cleansing, because lot of you (not you, reader) are way into your feelings too often.
We'll start with the hardest lesson in 136 years of Ohio State football, which is that even if the lessons of 2025 are learned and retained, college football is now changing at a velocity which may render them artifacts rather than principles in short order. Planning to build something meaningful in two or three seasons is a wasted effort. Win now is every program's mandate.
The Buckeyes are not going to solve how last season collapsed in winter so that 2026 turns out differently, because it's a whole new team, which will have a seasoned OC calling plays and an actual proven coordinator for the third unit, which has been an anchor on the program since the pandemic. Those NFL Combine highlight machines will be wearing different helmets.
The head coach, several faces and all of the expectations remain the same. It's time to cleanse ourselves of 2025 - here are the four reasons the Buckeyes didn't go back-to-back as CFP champions:
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Special Teams [Field Goals, punting, a just-get-off-the-field mentality creating a huge deficit of hidden yards and costly penalties - a mediocre dynamic now as entrenched in the program as Wide Receiver U]
- Remedy: Robbie Discher hired. First qualified hire for that role since Matt Barnes in 2019.
- Offensive Philosophy & Execution [failing to accommodate for an inexperienced QB against talent-equated opponents, chronic Red Zone inefficiencies not involving the aforementioned Field Goal kicker, sticking with long-developing routes while OL was in shambles, dialing up a critical 3rd down conversion for TE4 while benching WRs, sticking with a silent count vs. Miami, lack of game control agility vis a vis When It's Time to Turn Up the Gas, We Will]
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Talent Evaluation [critical misses, notably Ethan Onianwa as the program's biggest whiff in the portal era, inflated impression of TE room's capabilities, RB4 was RB1 to start the season, a walk-on was WR4 at WRU to end the season]
- Remedy: A work in progress, always.
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Personnel Decisions [allowing a first-time play-caller to run the offense, which had negative effects on his position group and the offense, his departure the week of the B1G championship, hiring an OL coach who is more specialized in other elements of the offense than OL coaching]
- Remedy: Prepare for uninvited chaos.
Four reasons! A homage to this scene from a classic film, parsing the value of a college degree.
None of those reasons were on display at the NFL Combine, if you exclude Lorenzo Styles Jr's rickety shoulder, which basically knocked him out of the Cotton Bowl. Phillip Daniels and CJ Donaldson were not portal misses - it wasn't a wholesale whiff, but it wasn't a Trey Sermon, Justin Fields or Caleb Downs-type of haul either.
They really could have used Mitchell Melton and Hero Kanu for depth is out of scope for this cleansing, as Ohio State's Defense was nowhere close to making out Four Reasons. That's just whining.
None of those NFL Combine standouts started at their positions for three full seasons, if you somehow need another data point into just how nefarious special teams' management has been. Now it's looking for its first new FG kicker since Noah Ruggles sent the Buckeyes' national championship game dreams somewhere north of Marietta to end 2022. If that guy's job was safe, they weren't really trying at all.
Ryan Day shedding the non-Head Coach jobs he was carrying was a step in the right direction, but giving play-calling to a first-timer simply to keep him with the program hurt the offense and impaired WR development in 2025. Day became a helicopter dad to the offense and David Adolph, along with a TE room that didn't have the ability or experience to deliver what was asked of it filled that vacuum. Hey, they tried. Better than special teams.
Indiana just proved that you don't need an NFL Combine convoy to win it all in a talent-flattened landscape.
Four big reasons, and we laid it all out. Now we can start with our cleanse. This one wasn't nearly as squandered as the perpetually aggrieved will make it out to be. Some of us are old enough to remember 1998. Some of you can remember 1969. Youngsters: How dare you.
The 2025 season began with 14 players being drafted in a game that has 22 starters. Both coordinators left the program and needed to be replaced. Repeating as national champions, even with a - technical football term incoming - dogshit schedule was nothing close to a layup.
The biggest culprit in your frustration is how good the Buckeyes ended up being for 12 weeks. Do you even remember who was predicted to win the conference? It was a consensus, and it wasn't Ohio State.
College football is evolving a terrifying velocity, and as recently as...this past season, Next Man Up could be applied to the QB room. Rolling out a redshirt freshman with a year of seasoning was a generally accepted practice. Julian Sayin turned 20 in July. The two starters in the CFP title game were 22 and 23 and had played a lot of college football.
Every title defense in program history has been clunky, only because reloading obscures the simple fact that there's significant rebuilding beneath the surface. Malaise and Entitlement did not make our list of reasons. You know why 2015 still burns? You know why.
That Squandered Season cabinet has some variety to it, but 2025 barely looks like the others. No off-the-field issues robbing the team of a difference-making running back, leaving the position room bare. No mystifying 3rd quarter against Michigan State, no SEC replay booth chicanery in Glendale. No banquet circuit and 51 days off before playing in a third 1 vs. 2 game.
This one was different. If you believe that Ohio State's coaches fell in love with a 12-minute drive in Ann Arbor that concluded with a PAT-length field goal even Jayden Fielding could make, and that invigorated them to lean into it against both IU and Miami - well guess what, I agree with you.
Ohio States full 20 play 11:56 drive to seal the game pic.twitter.com/tWFHUCX28p
— Brodie (@SadOSUhoopsFan) December 1, 2025
But what separates us is that I don't think that's damning. This is one of those hindsight things where everyone who watched Michigan eat shit wearing our colors saw the future. And it looked like the Buckeyes' game plans in what would be two close losses to championship teams.
The 2nd half of the Michigan game was confirmation bias that Ohio State was capable of becoming what it wanted to be all season long, minus the chronic red zone and special teams squirt-farts, which are tucked into our list of four reasons above - and were known; no hindsight required.
Debilitating clock-wasters against Indiana and Miami, which resulted in no points, were every part of the identity Day wanted his team to have, minus the scoreboard payoff. That doesn't mean the philosophy wasn't sound, it means they should have had a better goddamn kicker. And a few other things. They're on that list above.
The Buckeyes should have had better execution, but also keep in mind that, in general, non-Ohio State standards parlance, this was every bit of a rebuilding year and flawless execution the first time around is the highest bar the sport has to offer.
the 2026 BUCKEYES will arguably have more of a right to win the national title than the REBUILDING 2025 one EVER did.
They should have had the agility to throttle up the way they chose to in Madison against a pretty good defense, but that was merely a flash and not a preview. Perhaps a seasoned OC would have been able to maintain it.
Either way, when a defending national champion loses both coordinators, 14 draft picks and gets significantly younger than any champion in this era will ever be, it's not just one thing that goes wrong. In this case, it was four.
Getting older has been a big part of the Buckeyes' offseason, and the 2026 edition will arguably have more of a right to win the national title than the depleted 2025 one did. Indiana just proved that you don't need an NFL Combine convoy to win it all in a talent-flattened landscape.
Ohio State will always intend on having that advantage, which should be the difference in talent and coaching-equated matchups. What it needs to shore up now should be more obvious than ever before.
And that will be important for the 2026 season. The current principles aren't artifacts just yet.
