After being forced to watch the team from a certain neighboring state that shall not be named win a national title, a bevy of Buckeyes stars have returned to Columbus to join a talented transfer class on a (pricey) quest to win a title of their own.
Donovan Jackson wants to go into sports marketing when he’s finished playing football, and the star Ohio State offensive lineman has the personality for the job. Possessing wit, charm and an outgoing nature, the 320-pound Jackson is first-team All-Engaging. Until you ask him about Michigan. And the three-game losing streak to the Wolverines. And watching them win the 2023 national title.
Over the next six weeks, Ohio State watched the loathed Team Up North finish 15–0 and win its first national title since 1997, powering through thethat infuriated the rest of the Big Ten . Instead of wallowing in misery, though, the Buckeyes ambitiously drew up plans for a $20 million comeback for 2024.
The roster was suddenly so flush that the school’s last two national championship–winning coaches, Urban Meyer and Jim Tressel, both declared in June that this might be the most talented Buckeyes team in the school’s storied history. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Meyer, who is prone to hyperbole. But the understated Tressel backed him up: “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that many great players in that building all at once.
Without revealing specific numbers, sources familiar with the team salary structure say Tuimoloau is the highest-paid returning Buckeyes player. Downs is the highest-paid newcomer. There is plenty to go around for the other standouts on the roster. The unofficial GMs of Ohio State football acknowledge that while the players they make deals with are happy to have money, they’re also coming back for nonfinancial reasons. “As much as it feels like things have changed in college sports, and that a lot of the conversation centers around money, I think a lot of these decisions were old-school,” says Stetson.
Caleb Downs had already decided he was coming to Ohio State. But he couldn’t resist putting Day through a few seconds of prankish anguish before delivering the good news. Downs once spurned the Buckeyes, but chose to transfer and join Ohio State in its quest to defeat the Wolverines. / Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch / USA TODAY NETWORK
“I kind of put them in a room and said, ‘You guys talk through this thing,’ ” Day recalls. “They came out and they said, ‘Let’s do it.’ That was tremendous.” “We’re sitting in a meeting room and Ryan gets pulled out to take a call about somebody in the portal,” Kelly says. “The fact that I don’t have to answer that call, that I’m still in the room working on the game plan, is what I like.”
“He was in the facility 24/7,” Kelly says. “Every time you turned around you were like, ‘He’s here again?’ ” Ryan Day knows the question is coming before it’s fully articulated, and he says as much as he’s being asked it. The inquiry is about losing agonizingly close elimination games to teams that went on to win the last two national championships—Georgia in the 2022 CFP, Michigan in Ann Arbor in ’23—and finding the inches that turn those defeats into wins.
That’s a lot to ask, especially in an expanded and deeper Big Ten. But there are no excuses for these Buckeyes. Only expectations that must be met to rinse out the taste of rare, bitter defeats of recent years.
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