Breaking down the 2025 Ohio State spring game

College football's defending champions took to the field to scrimmage for our benefit, what can be learned from the display?

I try to follow where my logic and principles guide me in terms of analyzing the game of college football, even though I have some more and less obvious biases. One of the clear biases I’ve developed over the last half-decade is that the Ryan Day Ohio State Buckeyes are a front-running program with too much finesse to beat Jim Harbaugh’s Michigan or SEC opponents and a penchant for really dumb gameplans in big games (the 4-4 stack vs Devonta Smith and Alabama will always stand out).

However, in the long offseason I had to acknowledge before the 2024 campaign that the Ohio State Buckeyes had all the right pieces to win the National Championship and were the most obvious favorite in college football. Their success in retaining a big and veteran D-line, adding Caleb Downs and Will Howard and others from the transfer portal, and assembling a talented roster without holes and multiple talented receivers was hard to overlook. Over the course of the season I became convinced my previous bias against Ryan Day would win out before reversing course when the Buckeyes’ nasty passing attack quickly manifested in the playoffs.

It turns out the 2024 season was defined by strife and mismanagement on the staff before Ryan Day took over for the playoffs and re-emphasized his own offensive style while finally allowing Jim Knowles to have his way on defense. The implementation of those two’s preferred visions, combined with the costly roster, was too much for everyone else.

Yet now the Buckeyes have had to totally reload most of the team and much of the coaching staff. How is it looking? To the spring game film!