woofermazing said:

Catfish Biffs. Oh wait...

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So many slices of pie from there at 2am

Captain Buckeye said:

I agree. Part of me wonders about his exit to South Florida.

I always thought he’d land at a school like Minnesota, South Carolina, Stanford, or TCU kind of level.

Going to South Florida seems like if he had the option to he should’ve stayed until he got a mid level power four job.

I’m guessing here but wouldn’t be surprised if everyone knew it wasn’t working.

Anyway, I think this hire will work out but I have no expectations. Certainly nothing where I think he’s terrible.

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On top of everything else, Hartline’s recruiting dominance was basically over because of NIL, he can’t stack 3-4 #1 WRs anymore because you can’t pay them all #1 money no matter how good you are at recruiting.

BB73 said:

If the NCAA had any integrity, they would take about 1 week to verify what Dabo said, and if true immediately say the kid could never play football for Ole Miss.

After that, they can determine any further penalties.

So that won’t happen.

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What liability would that open them up to?

It’s got nothing to do with integrity, these are all lawyers. We need to try to look at it through that lense to make any sense at all.

ScriptOhio said:

Could Texas have a potential OL issue in 2026 too?

Texas, Alabama among teams with roster question marks as transfer portal cycle winds down

With transfer options dwindling, these teams face some question marks entering spring football

www.cbssports.com

Texas, Alabama among teams with lingering roster question marks as 2026 transfer portal cycle winds down​

With transfer options dwindling, these teams face some question marks entering spring football​

Texas: Offensive line​

The offensive line was the weak spot of Texas' 2025 roster, forcing Steve Sarkisian to replace two mainstays from that unit. He landed a likely starter at tackle in Melvin Siani but could still benefit from adding a ready-made option on the interior.

Given the Longhorns' aggressive approach at other positions -- and their flawless execution in a highly successful cycle -- it was somewhat surprising that they were only involved with one highly regarded lineman. Perhaps Siani's arrival, combined with another year of development from Trevor Goosby, Brandon Baker and Connor Robertson, will be enough to spark improvement and fill the remaining gap on a championship-caliber roster.

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They had Oline issues all this past year.

Mohamed Toure, key member of Miami defense, plans to return for rare eighth year of eligibility in 2026​

Toure began his college career at Rutgers in 2019​

Mohamed Toure's college football journey isn't ending anytime soon. The standout Miami linebacker is planning to return for the 2026 season, giving him a rare eighth year of eligibility, according to CBS Sports' Matt Zenitz and 247Sports' Gaby Urrutia. The decision follows the Hurricanes' run to the College Football Playoff National Championship Game and keeps one of their most productive defenders around for another year.

Toure's return is technically legitimate under NCAA rules. He redshirted as a true freshman at Rutgers in 2019. Then, in 2020, the NCAA granted all players a free year of eligibility because of the pandemic-shortened season. On top of that, Toure lost two full seasons to ACL injuries while at Rutgers -- in 2022 and again in 2024 -- both of which resulted in medical redshirts.

Stacked together, those technicalities created an unusual path: a traditional redshirt, a COVID waiver and two medical redshirts. The result is an eighth season of college football for a player who first arrived on campus at Rutgers in January 2019 as a three-star recruit.
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The decision also reflects the modern structure of college football. With NIL opportunities and revenue sharing now part of the landscape, staying in school has become a realistic option for players with remaining eligibility who aren't projected early-round NFL picks. For veterans like Toure, another year can offer both financial stability and a chance to improve draft positioning.

Eight seasons in college football isn't normal. It's not supposed to happen. But in Toure's case, the rules allow it -- and Miami is set to benefit from it.

calibuck said:

I laugh, but daughter lives in C'bus. She called, saying that Kroger's lines were loooong, and pretty much store was bare. Other than the fact she's like her mother, about 3-4 months of food in the pantry, she needed lettuce and a couple other expirables. Awaiting the 10-16 inch storm (?). Didn't realize that C'bus had 'stages' of safety, driving in snowy conditions, etc. Hopefully all residents don't have any emergencies, etc. Does anyone know if hospitals are staffed? Sounds like the powers that be don't want anybody on the streets. OK, back to tennis....

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The hospitals have to be staffed; they operate 24/7 regardless of the weather conditions.

I guess I should look at more than just the "College Football" and "Professional Football" threads in the off-season. Just stumbled upon this.... 2 weeks ago there was work toward a plan... what's the plan? Do I need to start donating again?

Well, this a shocker….. said no one

Xichigan played a D that I am not familiar with. Thorton was guarded by a Xichigan blanket. It worked. And Xichigan could throw what, 3 7 footers at the basket? Don't care how tall you are, block those suckers out, and force them to go 'over the top' for a rebound (and back them up while they're in the air). Put back stuffs were pretty common, while tOSU guys stood around wondering why their 'man' was scoring. Our second tall guy is a very blunt instrument. Someone above called it correctly. Many tOSU players were passing up open shots, instead passing the ball to our scorers, who were guarded closer then have seen before. And yeah, one doesn't become "Ohio Player of Year" with rebounds, but by scoring, and Cupps and White got their awards by putting the ball in the hole....OK, write it off and move on....

Hey, maybe we can double up on the NIL front, by getting Diebs to kick in for a dual scholarship for the basketbucks? He's got a #4 written all over him. (might help his agility around the line as well).

Well sure, he's glad to be offered by tOSU. It now makes him a 'player' in the NIL sweepstakes. Bet his asking price went up $500 grand.

If I woulda been in the early years, would have named Ohio, OIHIO, as it would have been a palindrome.

LeBron is still so fucking good, 41 years old and he's a basketball God.

Bestbuck36 said:

Sharing the ball beautifully this first half tonight. Lovely

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They're rounding into form, I'm still skeptical about a postseason run but that's life in the big city.

Just sayin': Here is an excellent 11W article explaining how Ohio State is apparently following what Indiana and Miami had done in building an "older" roster. Ohio State is currently positioned to field an older (i.e. more experienced) team in 2026. Needless to say, like it or not, with NIL and the transfer portal this is what college football has become.

Ohio State Following Formula Presented by Indiana, Miami In Building Older Roster Through Transfer Portal​

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 (and Cam Newton claimed during his podcast) that the average age of Indiana's starting lineup was 23 years old. Google's AI, Gemini (not as reliable as you think, trust me), claims the same. Other... sources? Claimed it to be 24.

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. The math is not mathing.

2025 Indiana Starters
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.

An Exodus of Youth​

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 Gundy less 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.

Five-star class of 2025 wide receiver Quincy Porter (Notre Dame) topped the list and the two top-100 2024 Ohio State prospects at cornerback, Bryce West (Wisconsin) and Aaron Scott Jr. (Oregon), had legitimate shots at playing time in 2026. So too did 2025 class member and defensive tackle Jarquez Carter (Miami) and rising third-year wide receiver Mylan Graham (Notre Dame).

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 Gundy less 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.

Five-star class of 2025 wide receiver Quincy Porter (Notre Dame) topped the list and the two top-100 2024 Ohio State prospects at cornerback, Bryce West (Wisconsin) and Aaron Scott Jr. (Oregon), had legitimate shots at playing time in 2026. So too did 2025 class member and defensive tackle Jarquez Carter (Miami) and rising third-year wide receiver Mylan Graham (Notre Dame).

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 (which other teams might be tampering to poach) 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.

An Influx of Experience​

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 Dominick Kelly (Georgia), is an underclassman.

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 Terry Moore (Duke) and Earl Little Jr. (Florida State) and defensive tackle John Walker (UCF) are shoo-ins for starting jobs, while linebacker Christian Alliegro (Wisconsin), defensive tackles James Smith (Alabama) and defensive end Qua Russaw (Alabama) will have solid chances to win them in position battles.

Tight ends Mason Williams (Ohio) and Hunter Welcing (Northwestern) 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 Kyle Parker (LSU) and Devin McCuin (UTSA) is likely to start alongside Jeremiah Smith and Brandon Inniss out wide, unless they are both overtaken by incoming five-star freshman Chris Henry Jr.

Even on special teams, core contributors will be grizzled veterans of other programs. Redshirt senior Dalton Riggs (UCF) is Ohio State’s new long snapper. Redshirt sophomore kicker Connor Hawkins joins 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 (81.8%) on field goals with a long of 54 yards.
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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.

Zurp said:

I agree, but are you referring to something specific?

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The patch approval. Greed is pervasive in every facet of life these days

colobuck79 said:

Agreed. I had Rome fatigue after a few years but he is much more listenable now.

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“Rack’em”

What the hell, why not?

I'll let Yahbot draft another pack of slappys and cut three All Stars in the first week.

It's a rite of spring

Won 6 out of 7 and beat Tampa 8-5 tonight....

Remember When: Ohio State Shuts Out USC, 33-0, For Its First-Ever West Coast Win​

“It was, to an Ohio stater, one of the most remarkable and soul-satisfying games a scarlet eleven ever has played.”– Columbus Dispatch sports editor Russ Needham on Ohio State’s 33-0 win over USC in 1941

Traveling to the West Coast has become an annual part of the Ohio State football season since the latest round of Big Ten expansion, but it used to be a far more rare occurrence.

When Ohio State traveled to Southern California for the second game of the 1941 season, it was just the third time in the 50-year history of Ohio State football that the Buckeyes played in the Pacific Time Zone. The first two trips didn’t go well for the scarlet and gray; Ohio State was shut out 28-0 in the 1921 Rose Bowl, then lost 13-12 in its first-ever game against USC in Los Angeles in 1937.

The Buckeyes’ second trip to the L.A. Coliseum, however, went far better than the first.

Although Ohio State was coming off a 12-7 win over Missouri in Paul Brown’s first game as head coach, beating USC was expected to be a tougher test for the Buckeyes. After all, just getting to Los Angeles was a three-day endeavor for the Buckeyes in those days; they left Columbus by train on Wednesday, stopping in Chicago to practice that day and in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to practice on Thursday before arriving in Los Angeles on Friday.

The game got off to a precarious start for the Buckeyes when Ohio State’s Tom Kinkade lost a fumble that USC recovered at Ohio State’s 49-yard line on the Buckeyes’ opening drive, but Ohio State’s defense stood stout to force a punt. USC got an even shorter field for its second possession after a low, wobbly punt by Ohio State’s John Hallabrin went out of bounds at the 26-yard line, but the Buckeyes made a fourth-down stop on a fake reverse to force a turnover on downs.

Ohio State drove 83 yards down the field on its third possession, with Jack Graf running for a 2-yard touchdown that was set up by a run by future Heisman Trophy winner Les Horvath, a backup halfback for Ohio State at the time. Dick Fisher scampered for 46 yards on a fake punt run on Ohio State’s fourth possession, setting up a 17-yard touchdown run by Charlie Anderson to put the Buckeyes up 13-0 before the end of the first quarter.

USC got another short field in the second quarter when it blocked a Hallabrin punt, but Kinkade intercepted a pass by USC’s Mickey Anderson in the end zone. The Buckeyes drove the ball 80 yards down the field, with Fisher rushing for a touchdown, to make it 20-0 before halftime.

Bob Shaw made a leaping catch on a pass from Graf and turned it into a 48-yard touchdown on Ohio State’s second possession of the third quarter to extend the Buckeyes’ lead to 27-0. After a fumble by Graf on Ohio State’s next series, Fisher intercepted a pass by USC’s Bobby Robertson. The Buckeyes drove from their 13-yard line all the way down the field on their subsequent possession, with Fisher gaining 10 yards on another fake punt and eventually finishing the drive with his second touchdown run of the game to make it 33-0.
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Fewest Rushing Yards By An Ohio State Opponent (Since 1936)
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buckeyebri said:

Life is full of choices….making them is easy…. Living with them is well the other part

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Yeah, and ....

Thump said:

I cannot be the only one that reads his name as Wonderful “Mounds” right?

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I’ve known a few…..just sayin