THE SITUATIONAL: From Strength to Strength

First hint --> this team faced Ohio State last month, which as of today was September. You're down to three possibilities since Bye doesn't count (no tricks!) and the Texas game was in August.

Second hint --> this team's offense snapped the ball 56 times, none of which resulted in touchdowns with - third hint - nine of those plays ending up as tackles for a loss, which is a lot. Your fourth and final hint is their quarterbacks were sacked twice, which means that on 20% of their snaps, the offense moved backwards.

For the football casuals among you: That's not what offenses are supposed to do. Moving backwards is not good, it's bad. You're thinking of moonwalking - that's when moving backwards is good. Actually...it's also bad, but it's the good bad. Capital B bad. If this is still confusing the intermission below will clear it up.

Okay, times up. We just described the Grambling Tigers, currently no.249 in SP+ rankings. You might have guessed no.29 Washington on account of both recency bias and the fact that the two crime scenes almost overlapped.

Almost. You could pass the red face test arguing Grambling was more successful.

Now, let's do what corporate slugs cringily refer to as a level set - reader, the first month of the college football season is The Fool's Month. It's where September Heismans are awarded, and that's fine. No regulatory or international crime fighting agency on earth is cracking down on the imaginary fields where Hopium flourishes. Hopium is bad, but not bad-bad. It's good-bad adjacent.

You still should not jump to dangerously optimistic conclusions based on The Fool's Month. And yet, I'm contractually obligated to place words that carry some sort of meaning in this space during this part of the calendar. It's a conundrum. I quit doing Hopium after the 2006 season. It's Derrick Harvey's fault.

Do I think the 2025 Ohio State defense is significantly better than the two best ones I've personally witnessed (1996 and 2002) during my embarrassingly long tenure writing about gigantic Central Ohio teenage gladiators? The Buckeyes have only played four games, you fatuous jobbernowl. That's the Hopium asking. My answer is a resounding maybe.

I still don't trust Ohio State's depth at scrimmage in a journey intended to wind through 16 games with increasing degrees of stakes and difficulty. What I do trust is that if you're an offensive tackle thinking about bullying Caleb Downs, you're begging for the wrong kind of attention.

Nah Curry Making Sure Nobody Touches Caleb pic.twitter.com/99AHMDGjSu

— Rocky (@Rockerfellerr_) September 29, 2025

Washington C Carver Willis and G Landon Hatchett alternated between targeting Downs directly during the 1st half on Saturday, and as it wound down Caden Curry started and ended a fight about it. He was the Third Bosa of the Apocalypse throughout The Fool's Month, lined up next to Kayden McDonald, pictured atop the article.

Those two played just 14 combined snaps in the CFP title game. No one expected them to be this good. Arvell Reese? He's basically Growth Spurt Ryan Shazier and he played only six snaps against Notre Dame, five fewer than Devin Sanchez on Saturday - he wasn't a college student until January. Every hole they've plugged from the NFL guys who left has not cracked. Not yet.

Notoriously impatient Ohio State fans have no idea how to emotionally accept a rebuild going like this. It can't. I'm not even on Hopium and I'm awash in radioactive positivity.

Fool's Month ended yesterday. Homecoming is Saturday! Let's get Situational.

OPENER | THE LESS THEY KNOW ABOUT US

Ohio State Buckeyes quarterback Julian Sayin (10) hands off to running back Bo Jackson (25) during the second half of the NCAA football game at Husky Stadium in Seattle on Sept. 27, 2025. Ohio State won 24-6. © Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

The fun thing about writing on Wednesdays during the season is that every possible take about what took place last Saturday and what's to come this weekend has already been seasoned, chewed, swallowed, excreted and flushed into the Buckeye football ecosystem by the time it's my turn to publish.

I wouldn't have it any other way. The lag gives me enough time to come up with new, dumb metaphors for what we've all just accepted. Ohio State's offense is a stunning, powerful all-terrain 12-cylinder vehicle being driven by a kid who just turned 20 but still looks 12.

He's been instructed to drive it with one foot on the gas while the other is on the brake. Everyone he passes - on our side of the street, anyway - is screaming at him to broooo gooooo faaaaster but he's committed to avoid being ticketed in a school zone.

Dashboards don't lie, and neither do driving reports. Through four starts, Julian Sayin has the best completion percentage in the nation. He's no.4 in passer rating, no.8 in yards per attempt, no.14 in QBR and no.21 in touchdown passes while simultaneously ranking no.92 in passing attempts per game and no.98 in passing attempts, period.

RYAN DAY BEGAN CELEBRATING JEREMIAH SMITH'S TOUCHDOWN RIGHT AS THE BALL LEFT JULIAN SAYIN'S HAND.

No gas, all brakes. The crossing guard appreciates him keeping it steady with little ones present.

You have to believe the coaching staff will introduce him to the higher gears once they feel like he's gotten comfortable with the handling. They know what this car can do. If you split-screened Sayin's touchdown pass to Jeremiah Smith from Saturday, you would have seen Ryan Day celebrating the touchdown as the ball was being thrown.

That's to say they are content to keeping it well below the speed limit, for now. This is fine if you get to make that decision, but when you have All of Those Disastrous Michigan Game Plans on the brain, the little tics and tremors are hard to ignore. Keeping Washington in the game for as long as they did - on their home field - was a choice.

A week prior to Ohio State putting 24 on the Huskies, Washington State - that's America's 110th-best scoring offense to you and me - produced the same point total in the Apple Cup. Colorado State (131st) scored 21 earlier in the schedule. The Buckeyes simply kept pace with America's worst offensive units and won by 18. That was a choice.

Let Julian Sayin cook pic.twitter.com/OMPi2BjlZC

— CFBNumbers (@CFBNumbers) September 27, 2025

Among the other choices this offense makes is keeping the backfield workload shared between CJ Donaldson, James Peoples and Bo Jackson. Donaldson looks great, runs upright and falls sideways. He has 463 college carries. Known commodity.

Peoples is a chippy blocker, has infectious enthusiasm and often falls down or backwards when hit once. Seventy-seven college carries. He and Donaldson gave themselves nicknames during the offseason:

Peoples...and Donaldson call themselves “Sonic and Knuckles,” a nickname based on characters from the Sonic the Hedgehog video game series. Sonic is a blue hedgehog known for his incredible speed, while Knuckles is a red echidna renowned for his strength.

In lesser seasons, we would have been stuck with Thunder and Lightning or Smash and Dash as a tired description of two players of varied shapes, sizes and speeds. This season, we get a video game reference I'm not too old to immediately understand.

We could have had some Minecraft or Fortnite bullshit I would have been forced to ask my kids about, but Donaldson and Peoples had the common courtesy to use characters from a game I played regularly 31 years ago while crushing warm wine coolers someone's parents had misplaced.

Thirty-one years ago. Coincidentally, that was OG Bo Jackson's final season playing professional sports. You come for the car metaphors and reluctantly stay on the page for the segues. Ohio State's best running back is a freshman who does not project to any video game character.

He fits through tiny holes at top speed while folded in half and falls forward. Contact balance:

Freaky contact balance from Bo Jackson... pic.twitter.com/zxEM20JgPx

— The Ballmanac (@The_Ballmanac) September 30, 2025

Sayin is going to keep riding the brakes because that's what dad wants him to do. The running back committee is a luxury as Ohio State is now several seasons into its post-bell cow era. Is this charade lulling future opponents into believing the Buckeyes cannot go vertical?

You know what? I don't think they can do it. Smith and Carnell Tate might just be possession receivers without any game-breaking ability. Stand down, future opponents. We'll just have to see how far the Buckeyes' obvious limitations can take them.

INTERMISSION

The Solo

Last year in an attempt to exorcise the demons of Michigan claiming a national title* songs exclusively from 1997 were sacrificed in this space. This strategy worked marvelously, so this year's theme will be Songs From Any Year Except 1997 or 2023.

The title track from Michael Jackson's second-best album dropped the same week the 1987 Buckeyes opened their season (against West Virginia, whom they followed with Oregon before heading to Baton Rouge - they don't make pop music or non-conference schedules the way they used to).

Bad is a b-minor common time banger. Compositionally, you can replace the sinsemilla in Jammin' by Bob Marley with ephedrine to get Bad. Or, swap out the MDMA in Get the Party Started by P!nk with diazepam, same result. If you can sing one, you can sing all three.

Contemporary music uses common ingredients, some of which are scheduled. Don't try that home, kids. Drugs are bad. Not the good bad. The good Bad has an organ solo. Let's answer our two questions.

Is the musician in the video actually playing organ?

This part of the song is different on the album than it is in the video, which was directed by Martin Scorsese. Both solos were performed on Hammond B3 midi organs (think: Santana, Dylan, Allman Brothers, Booker T. & the MGs - heavy users of those keys).

It is shocking in retrospect that Scorsese didn't replace the album solo wholesale with The Stones' Gimme Shelter. Doing the honors is late jazz legend Jimmy Smith. He does not appear in the video. VERDICT: No, conclusive.

does this organ solo slap?

We're being treated to a Jacksonified vision of West Side Story, where that organ solo serves as a musical set piece to a little parking garage ballet. MJ was never going to eclipse his Thriller badness, but the effort here was admirable. Pre-Willie Mays Hayes Wesley Snipes plays the gang leader. Scorsese is an American treasure. VERDICT: Slaps

The Bourbon

There is a bourbon for every situation. Sometimes the spirits and the events overlap, which means that where bourbon is concerned there can be more than one worthy choice.

Ironclad. For the boats that served the Republic.

Minnesota, led by former Jim Tressel graduate assistant P.J. Fleck is this Saturday's Homecoming spectacle. The portable culture he first installed at Western Michigan before paddling to Minneapolis - as you've probably heard - is row the boat.

His teams' helmets have oars on them, which has meaning beyond the fact that gophers are lousy swimmers. Fleck's teams are guided by agility, so it shouldn't be shocking that after years of being rush-first they are suddenly chucking the ball around this season. Agility means leaning into strengths, and at least through September - that's throwing the ball.

So...is there a bourbon for that? Of course there is.

The Ironclad Distillery is an homage to the first ships to be armored ahead of tangling forces with the Confederacy. This is a four-grainer going 70/10/10/10 before aging in 30-gallon barrels - which are a little more than half the usual size.

More surface area contact with the juice is the idea here - and at least visually it tracks, as I've never had anything from Ironclad that didn't look like the strongest ice tea ever brewed. Small barrels are a fairly common tool. You trade scale for time. More than one way to be efficient.

This vintage is a youthful two-year minimum but still packs some surprising complexity. Nectarines soaked in Bordeaux on the nose to dense pastry on the palate. Dark chocolate-smeared shoe leather finish.

Pricing is all over the place, but retail should be $75. It's a good hang. Their black-on-black label is an odd design choice, but there's no time for reading when you're rowing a boat.

CLOSER | THE FUTURE OF NUTRITION

Beau Atkinson celebrates a sack with Sonny Styles during the 2nd half against Ohio at Ohio Stadium on Sept. 13. © Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

A 16-game season was both theoretical and desired one year ago. To that end, the Closer was devoted to a Sustainability Tracker, which took note of the critical measurements against overmatched opponents that would signal the Buckeyes were taking their own wear and tear seriously.

The first measure was 1st half margin. I set an arbitrary mark of 35 points, which felt comfortable enough for the depth chart to take on the majority of 2nd half duties. The second was the number of players playing, which was 65 - if that many guys get into a game, your starters are being preserved.

Third was the number of snaps. Fewer plays also means less mileage on your top 44 guys. Here's how that looked entering the Indiana game, which marked the end of Ohio State's scheduled down-bad opponents:

The eventual national champions built decent 1st half margins and got a lot of guys onto the field over those five games, which they won by a gaudy total of 216 points. The snap cap, which I unscientifically derived by putting my index finger in the air and then making a who-farted face was aggressively low in hindsight.

Snap Cap is more appropriately described as Pace of Play, an area some Ohio State fans have used to scrutinize Day's game management. The Buckeyes could have beaten the Huskies 38-6 instead of 24-6 had they just played with the slightest bit of urgency.

At ITS current clip, Nebraska will be playing about Four football games for every Three Ohio State's players sustain.

That didn't happen. It's not going to happen. Urgency is not part of their pacing strategy, which is that every Saturday is being orchestrated - again - with the 14th, 15th and 16th games in mind.

Ohio State is going to continue to rank near 100th or lower in pacing as long as there's a 16-game journey in play, Currently, they're 126th. Last season they were 123rd. They're not in a hurry.

The game in Seattle was relatively speedy - they were 96th nationally at the pace we just saw. There are 136 FBS programs this season, and Ohio State's peers near the bottom of the pacing list are almost exclusively stinky teams with zero playoff aspirations.

B1G programs range from 10th (Nebraska, 77.7 plays) to Ohio State, with ~17 fewer plays per game. Last year, Ohio State and Michigan were nearly identical in pacing. The Wolverines have picked things up slightly in 2025 - they rank 114th now.

At their current clip, Nebraska will be playing about four football games for every three Ohio State's players sustain. There's no exactly right way to do this, but the Buckeyes' blueprint for freshness in 2024 was one of the strategies which went according to plan.

SITUATIONAL ARCHIVE The Situational Whiskey Cellar

So they're deploying it again with the intent that December and January produce the best, freshest version of the team. Play less football now so more football can be played later.

Thanks for getting Situational today. Go Bucks. Beat Minnesota. See you at Eleven Dubgate 13!