Ohio State Shows How Elite It Can Be in 2024 with Dominant Performance Against Western Michigan

The fact that Ohio State’s 46-point win against Akron in Week 1 left Ryan Day and Buckeye fans wanting more showed how high the expectations are for the 2024 Ohio State football team.

Ohio State’s performance against Western Michigan in Week 2 demonstrated that this year’s Buckeyes are capable of meeting those expectations.

The Buckeyes were every bit as dominant as they should be against an overmatched opponent in Saturday night’s 56-0 win at Ohio Stadium.

Offensively, the Buckeyes scored touchdowns on eight of their 13 possessions, putting up 683 yards of offense – 121 more yards than they had in any game last year. After facing scrutiny for starting slow and mediocre run blocking against Akron, Ohio State answered both of those concerns against Western Michigan. OSU scored touchdowns on five of its first six drives and averaged exactly seven yards per carry while rushing for six touchdowns, the first time the Buckeyes have done that in a single game since 2019.

Defensively, the Buckeyes couldn’t have done their job much better. They earned their first shutout since 2019 while holding Western Michigan to only 99 total yards on 13 possessions, marking the first time since 2017 that Ohio State has held an opponent under 100 yards in a game.

Ohio State asserted itself as the better team from the jump and never let up for 60 minutes, even after all of its starters were out of the game. The Buckeyes scored on two of four possessions after Will Howard’s night was done – and probably could have scored on three of four if they hadn’t elected to take a knee at the 26-yard line to run out the clock in the final minute – while their defense forced 3-and-outs on all five of Western Michigan’s second-half possessions even though its backups played most of the half.

Ryan Day wasn’t surprised by how well his team played because of how well the Buckeyes practiced in the week leading up to the game.

“To me, it goes back to our week of practice. We practiced strong and physical and had good intent; we had a good Tuesday, had a really good Wednesday and I felt like we were about to kind of come into a game where we were going to dominate like this,” Day said. “I just kind of had that feeling going into the game. But it came down to the players playing really hard.”

While Ohio State was heavily favored to beat Western Michigan, the Buckeyes took the Broncos seriously as an opponent because of how competitive they were in Week 1 against Wisconsin, taking a lead early in the fourth quarter against the Badgers before ultimately losing 28-14. That gave the Buckeyes a sense of urgency all week in practice, which showed in the way they played on Saturday night.

“Just starting fast, give them no hope,” said linebacker Sonny Styles. “When you have a team like that, if you let them hang around, they can make some things happen. They're obviously not a terrible team, they've got some solid players on their side as well. So you definitely want to start it fast and choke them out.”

It’s been known all offseason that Ohio State had one of if not the most talented rosters in college football, with the biggest questions being the offensive line and quarterback play. Saturday brought encouraging signs in both of those areas; the offensive line had a mostly dominant performance even with Donovan Jackson out for the second game in a row, while Howard played well for the second straight game to start his Ohio State career, completing 18 of 26 passing attempts – including his first 10 straight attempts of the night – for 292 yards and a touchdown while also showing his running ability with a six-yard touchdown gallop.

If those two trends continue, Ohio State might well be the most complete team in the country. Its defense has fully lived up to expectations so far, allowing just six total points through two games. Its running back tandem of TreVeyon Henderson and Quinshon Judkins (who combined for 174 yards and four touchdowns against Western Michigan) is living up to the hype, as is its receiving corps led by Emeka Egbuka and Jeremiah Smith, who continued his rapid ascent to superstardom with a five-reception, 119-yard game headlined by a 70-yard touchdown catch-and-run.

All of that makes it easy to begin thinking ahead to what could be for the 2024 Buckeyes, as Ohio State projects to be favored in every game for the rest of the regular season. Oregon, who has been seen as Ohio State’s top competition for the Big Ten, barely beat Boise State on Saturday night after struggling to a 10-point win over Idaho in its season opener. Michigan, the team Ohio State wants to beat more than any other, looked nowhere close to its national championship form from last season in its 31-12 loss to Texas on Saturday. Penn State came dangerously close to losing to Bowling Green on Saturday before surviving for a 34-27 victory.

In reality, though, Ohio State still has a long way to go before it can achieve any of its major goals for the season. The Buckeyes certainly look like a contender to achieve all of those goals – beating Michigan, winning the Big Ten and winning the national championship – based upon how they played Saturday, but Western Michigan will be one of the weakest opponents Ohio State faces this season, albeit one that was perceived to be a step up from Akron.

So while the Buckeyes feel great about how they played in Week 2 and now have a week off from game action before they play Marshall in their final non-conference game of the regular season, Ohio State intends to get right back to work this upcoming week and continue looking for ways to get better even though it played as well as anyone could have expected against WMU.

Day’s postgame message to his team was one that was repeated by a majority of the players who met with the media after the game: It’s not a bye week, it’s an “improvement week.”

“We played a good game, I'm very satisfied with how it went, but I think the overwhelming message is that there was still meat on the bone,” Howard said. “We feel good about it, but there's still so much to improve on and I'm excited to get into the film and look at what we did well, but most importantly what we didn't do well and what we can improve on.”