If all goes according to plan, Ohio State will have a full allotment of 15 spring football practices culminating with a spring game in Ohio Stadium.
As we learned in 2020, things don’t always go according to plan during a pandemic. There’s still the possibility of a COVID-19 outbreak within the team forcing the Buckeyes to alter their practice plans at any time. Ryan Day is optimistic, though, that the Buckeyes will mostly be able to proceed forward with business as usual in 2021.
“We’re planning on having a somewhat normal spring where we can have six weeks of a lead-up of working in the facility and then having a normal spring practice schedule,” Ryan Day said Wednesday. “The thing that isn’t different is we’re still under COVID protocols, so we still can’t have a lot of group things together, and we have to make sure we’re still following all those things, we’re still being tested and all that. But we’re hoping all to be together and we’re not broken up like we were last year.”
A full spring of practices would be a big improvement over last offseason, when Ohio State held just three spring practices before COVID-19 shut down the sports world. The Buckeyes left campus for spring break after just one week of practices last March and did not return to the Woody Hayes Athletic Center until June. Time that should have been spent going through spring practices and offseason workouts together was instead spent at home, as players and coaches weren’t even allowed to be at the Woody or gather together on campus.
Of course, no one knew at this time last year that COVID-19 would have such an interruptive impact on college football. But now that the Buckeyes have a full season of experience handling COVID-19 protocols, they’re going into their offseason with an understanding of the challenges the virus can present, which should help them navigate it even though they can’t completely prevent it.
Ideally, vaccines will provide a path for things to really start getting back to normal by the time the season rolls around this fall. For now, though, the Buckeyes have to stay diligent about following protocol – which will mean some alterations to how they normally practice, just as they had to deal with this past fall – to give themselves the best possible chance to have a full, uninterrupted spring.
“We’re hoping that it gets back to normal,” Day said. “We were all home last spring, so at least the fact that we’re going to be able to have seven weeks of offseason training and then a full spring, that at least gets us back to normal somewhat. We still have to follow COVID protocol until we start getting more information our way. And then we’re hoping that maybe in the spring or late spring, we’re able to get some recruits back on campus. So yeah, I think a little bit over time, we are getting back to normal.”
While Ohio State was able to overcome the stops and starts of last offseason (which every team in the country had to deal with to some extent) and make it to the national championship game, the Buckeyes still have to make up for lost time this offseason.
Because the Buckeyes only had three spring practices last offseason and only eight games during the 2020 season, their returning players – particularly their young players who didn’t see regular playing time – missed out on valuable reps that could now have them behind where they should be going into this spring. That’s especially true at quarterback, where neither C.J. Stroud nor Jack Miller even threw a single pass in a game last season, though it applies to players at all positions.
“We missed out on a lot of snaps this year,” Day said. “And so a lot of these guys are still kind of figuring out where they’re at in all this. And so this is a big, big spring, and a big offseason, probably one of the biggest offseasons we’ve had in awhile here for those younger guys.”
Given that, Day said Ohio State is “gonna try to figure out ways without taking guys to the ground to simulate as many games as possible,” even floating the possibility that the Buckeyes could play multiple spring games.
“I think that would go a long way for us, because we need that kind of stuff,” Day said. “We need that experience. We need that for our guys. It’s not just the quarterbacks. But certainly the quarterbacks are the highest concern.”
As of now, the tentative plan is to play a spring game – another thing the Buckeyes didn’t get to do last year – on April 17. Probably not coincidentally, that’s just two days after the current NCAA recruiting dead period ends up on April 15, at which point recruits could finally be able to make visits to college campuses for the first time in over a year.
@Dasan2022 Ill see you in Columbus April 16th#GoBuckeyes
— CJ Hicks (@imcjhicks) February 4, 2021
That said, Ohio State’s most important task over the next three months is to develop its young and inexperienced players. That process started Monday, when the Buckeyes began winter workouts after a postseason break, and will ramp up in six or seven weeks – an exact start date has not yet been finalized – when they begin spring practices.
As long as the Buckeyes are able to stay on course with that plan, Day believes his young players will ultimately get to where they need to be by fall even though their development opportunities were stunted in 2020.
“Now that we have a whole year with an offseason and a spring and a preseason, this is gonna allow us the best chance to put our guys in the best position to be successful,” Day said.
