As the Buckeyes head into the 2015 season, the most heralded defensive player will obviously be junior defensive end Joey Bosa.
Coming off a sophomore season in which he was a finalist for both the Bednarik Award and the Lombardi Award, Bosa might be in position to cap his collegiate career with one last shrug-filled romp through the Big Ten.
Sure, he’ll just be a junior, but the 6-foot-5, 278-pound beast out of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was a unanimous first-team All-B1G selection in 2014 by both the coaches and the media and the conference’s Nagurski-Woodson Defensive Player of the Year, as well as the Smith-Brown Defensive Lineman of the Year.
Beyond the conference, he was on every college football All-American team in 2014 and helped lead the Buckeyes to the first ever College Football Playoff championship.
Bosa, as we’ve seen over the past two seasons, has the entire package—strength, size, quickness, speed, agility, technique, instinct, and a knack of rising to the moment. His walk-off sack at Penn State leaps to mind as an example of a combination of several of his best attributes.
There’s really not much left for the big bear to prove in college football, which sadly means that he’s probably going to go play on Sundays after the 2015 season.
So what can we expect from Bosa in what is likely to be his final season in Columbus?
After posting seasons of 29 and 39 solo tackles his first two years of college football, Bosa could elevate into the 50-solo-tackles range in 2015. He’s unlikely to see more creative ways to neutralize him than he did last year and he should be quicker at recognizing anything special coming his way. He should finish with somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 total tackles based on steady improvement from his freshman and sophomore years.
Bosa has a fumble recovery for a touchdown in each of his first two seasons. He’s a big-play defensive end and in all likelihood he’ll find a way to get into the end zone once or twice as a junior. Perhaps he’ll grab his first career interception or maybe get the trifecta of a sack, fumble recovery and touchdown. If the past is any indicator, he’ll be around the ball and he’ll make things happen.
With 34.5 tackles for loss and 21 sacks in his first two years at Ohio State, Bosa has shown he knows how to be disruptive and make plays on the other side of the line of scrimmage. He’ll do that again this year but how much is dependent upon the production from the rest of the defensive line and how well it plays. If Jalyn Holmes or someone else can provide a higher level of play than Steve Miller did last year, it could hurt Bosa’s overall numbers, even as it improves the defense and makes him even more disruptive.
If the status quo remains, I’d expect Bosa to finish with around 15 sacks and 24 TFLs. That would likely get him back into the discussion for several major postseason individual awards. If his production and development holds, Buckeye opponents will lose more than 100 yards on Bosa sacks this year. That’s insane. How many defensive players can net you a whole football field over the course of a season?
Bosa failed to force a fumble as a freshman, but he knocked four footballs loose as a sophomore in 2014. That relentless pursuit of the ball will continue in Year 2 under Larry Johnson’s tutelage and I expect five or more forced fumbles.
If Bosa is able to provide this type of production as a junior, Ohio State’s defense will likely continue its climb back toward the glory days of Silver Bullet defensive production. He’ll probably repeat as an award winner in everything he captured last year, plus he should win the trophies he was merely a finalist for in 2014.
It’ll also provide a great deal of production for a team trying to get back to its second College Football Playoff.
