Following the blueprints of Indiana and Miami this season, Ohio State has built a more veteran roster through the transfer portal in 2026.
A lot of average age numbers were floated about Indiana’s 2025 football roster during and after the Hoosiers’ run to a national championship. In truth, those figures can only be estimates. College football teams don’t hand out birthdates for their players.
ESPN claimed during its College Football Playoff national championship broadcast that the average age of Indiana's starting lineup was 23 years old. Google's AI, Gemini , claims the same. Other... To be 23 years old playing college football means being a sixth-year player who was 18 years old as a true freshman, as the majority of college freshmen are in the fall. But if you're generous and say every freshman started at 19, that makes the average man in Indiana's starting lineup a fifth-year senior in terms of experience. 14 of the Hoosiers' 22 starters were fourth-year players or younger.Exaggerated age figures aside, the level of experience consistent throughout Curt Cignetti's national championship-winning roster is undeniable. Seventeen of his 22 starters were in their fourth year or later of college football. They started one sophomore on offense and two on defense, then the rest were juniors or older. And more than half of them arrived in Bloomington, Indiana, through the transfer portal. That included redshirt junior Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Fernando Mendoza, an import from Cal. That last fact is also true of Miami, the team Indiana played in the College Football Playoff national championship and the only team outside the Hoosiers to beat Ohio State in 2025. The Hurricanes’ roster was built out of a majority of portal acquisitions, and 15 of their 22 starters were fourth or fifth-year players. Call them mercenaries, sulk about the current state of affairs in a college football landscape with yearly unrestricted free agency for each of its players, but it’s reality. This is quickly becoming the way to win in this sport. Program-developed recruits have their place, but less of one than ever before. Get the proven portal players or play from behind the rest of the country. It’s become clear from the movement to and from Ohio State in this transfer portal cycle that Ryan Day is not ignorant of this fact. Oxymoronically, the Buckeyes are modernizing by going older. The new pieces going out and coming in are skewing the average age of their team higher – even if the exact figures can’t be known. Let’s break it down.Wide receiver Quincy Porter is one of nine former Ohio State players to enter the transfer portal after one season. Was it the exact plan for Ohio State to shed no less than nine members of its 2025 freshman class after that group was on campus for less than a calendar year? Or for the Buckeyes to lose another 11 class of 2024 representatives as part of a 31-player flood from Columbus to the portal? Not those exact numbers, no. But the general trend, yes. It happened everywhere during the portal’s 15-day window from Jan. 2 through Jan. 16. Alabama saw 21 players enter the portal, Texas had 25, notoriously huge NIL spender Oregon had 28 and Oklahoma had 27. These are all blueblood schools retaining their head coaches in 2026. Wonder what it’s like for a have-not undergoing a regime change? The now-Mike Gundyless Oklahoma State had 64 players portal out and has 54 commitments from the portal so far. The harsh fact is, roster space needed to be cleared, and many of the players leaving the confines of the Woody Hayes Athletic Center weren’t going to contribute to Ohio State’s 2026 football team, and in many cases, weren’t ever going to contribute to any Ohio State football team. Not in games, at least. There are exceptions to that rule that hurt.Those types of talents hurt to lose. At the same time, there needs to be a constant drive to win now for Ohio State, and a matter of resource allocation. Proper resource allocation toward retention of a pile of seniors and big transfer portal acquisitions like Caleb Downs, Seth McLaughlin, Quinshon Judkins and Will Howard led Ohio State to a national championship in 2024. The Buckeyes were ahead of the times in dedicating NIL dollars to roster retention. Now, the times call to allocate resources away from young, and perhaps more unknown, players and spend those funds on veterans with known value to achieve the best result possible seven months later. And until guardrails are put in place to contain some of this chaos, that’s how the top teams in college football will be built. All-in pushes on portal veterans to win now. There is no longer the time or resources or patience from players and their agents for programs to build over multiple years.Former Alabama defensive tackle James Smith is one of Ohio State's most prized veteran portal acquisitions in 2026. Credit: Dale Zanine-Imagn Images Ohio State shed 20 players who just completed their first or second season in 2025 during this past portal window. The Buckeyes have added back 17 players since, and in the true mold of Indiana and Miami, 15 are fourth or fifth-year players. Only one portal signee, rising sophomore cornerback The targeted goal of building with experience is exemplified on the defensive side of the football. There’s a chance that a majority of the starters on Ohio State’s defense are redshirt juniors or seniors acquired via the portal. Safeties With Earl Little Jr., Terry Moore and Jaylen McClain, Ohio State’s Defense is Set for A Grand Return to Three-Safety Base in 2026 will bolster the top of the team’s depth chart at the position as a redshirt junior and redshirt senior, respectively. One of fourth-year wide receivers is likely to start alongside Jeremiah Smith and Brandon Inniss out wide, unless they are both overtaken by incoming five-star freshmanjoins Kelly as the Buckeyes’ only other transfer with less than three years of seasoning, and he gained plenty of experience as a redshirt freshman at Baylor in 2025, going 18-of-22 on field goals with a long of 54 yards.There’s a reasonable projection of Ohio State’s 2026 depth chart that features 16 fourth or fifth-year players among its 22 starters, and adding Smith, Julian Sayin, Jaylen McClain and Bo Jackson, 20 who have at least one year of starting experience. Ohio State is doing its best to modernize by getting older as Ryan Day enters his eighth season at the helm. 135 other FBS programs are doing the same. The portal has reshaped how contenders will rise and fall in the sport. Indiana is proof. One great class can win a natty. One bad class can blow up in catastrophic ways. But the Buckeyes chose to adapt rather than let any chances of a championship die in January, and hope their most one-year-mercenary-laden roster of the Day era takes them to the places they want to go.Final Coaches Poll Ballots: Eight Coaches Rank Ohio State 3rd, Miami ’s Chuck Martin Ranks Buckeyes 10th, Delaware’s Ryan Carty Forgets OSU
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