College Football Playoff Gives Ohio State Seniors Their Final Chance to Achieve A Major Team Goal

Ohio State’s 2021 class was and still is its highest-rated recruiting class of all-time. Led by seven composite five-star recruits – Quinn Ewers, JT Tuimoloau, Jack Sawyer, Emeka Egbuka, Donovan Jackson, TreVeyon Henderson and Kyle McCord – the 2021 class was expected to not only keep the Buckeyes’ dominance over Michigan and in the Big Ten going, but bring at least one national championship to Columbus.

“The direction of our program just continues to keep getting better and better,” Sawyer told Eleven Warriors in January 2021. “And I think we’re going to win a few national championships here. I think we’re gonna win five, six, maybe seven, eight in the ‘20s. So I’m super excited.”

Nearly four years later, however, the 2021 class’ time in Columbus has been defined by one disappointment after another. Ohio State had won eight straight games against Michigan and four straight Big Ten championships going into the 2021 season; it’s gone 0-4 against the Wolverines and hasn’t even made a Big Ten Championship Game since. And it has yet to win any of the national championships Sawyer predicted the Buckeyes would win this decade.

Sawyer, Tuimoloau, Egbuka, Jackson, Henderson, Jordan Hancock, Tyleik Williams and Denzel Burke have all been multi-year stars for the Buckeyes from that class (as were Marvin Harrison Jr. and Michael Hall Jr. before they left early for the 2024 NFL draft), yet they’re all at risk of leaving Ohio State without ever accomplishing any of the team’s three major goals of beating Michigan, winning the Big Ten or winning the national championship.

They still have one more chance to achieve the last goal, though.

No amount of success in the College Football Playoff can fully make up for the fact that this year’s seniors – including fifth-year seniors like Cody Simon, Lathan Ransom, Ty Hamilton, Josh Fryar and Gee Scott Jr., who won a Big Ten championship in 2020 but also never beat Michigan because the 2020 game against the Wolverines was canceled due to COVID-19 – will leave Ohio State without a pair of Gold Pants. But their focus right now is on chasing the goal that remains on the table.

“Sometimes you can't accomplish all your goals, but we have the opportunity to accomplish the biggest goal possible right now,” Simon said. “So we're putting all of our chips in.”

With a chance to still win it all, Ohio State’s players who met with the media this week weren’t particularly interested in dwelling on what went wrong against Michigan. But Henderson believes the loss to the Wolverines humbled them and made them more grateful for the opportunity they still have to achieve a major goal.

“We have a great opponent coming up, Tennessee, and it's going to be an amazing game. They're a really good team and it's going to be an amazing game,” Henderson said. “So that's what we're focused on. And we truly are just thankful, man, for this opportunity to win the big thing.”

Some of Ohio State’s seniors have dismissed the notion that they need any extra motivation than they’ve had in any of their past attempts to achieve their major goals. While the Buckeyes have fallen short of beating Michigan and winning the Big Ten in four straight years and haven’t won a national championship since 2014, those shortfalls haven’t been for any lack of trying.

“If you went back to Georgia 2022, the other time we made the playoffs, I was laser-focused then, too,” Egbuka said. “So I think we have the same mindset going in. Obviously, in the back of our heads, we know, ‘OK, this is our last hurrah, our last chance,’ but we're never looking at it as, ‘OK, it's now or never.’ It's always now or never. We're trying to win every single game every time we get an opportunity to go all the way. So that's been our mindset the last couple of years. We've come up short, but we have an opportunity to do something special this year.”

That said, the reality is a majority of Ohio State’s starters won’t get another opportunity to rewrite their legacies if they fall short again in this year’s CFP. Fourteen of Ohio State’s 22 projected starters against Tennessee are seniors who will exhaust their collegiate eligibility whenever the Buckeyes’ CFP run ends, so there won’t be another chance for them to come back and right wrongs like they did last offseason when they opted to stay for their senior seasons rather than enter the NFL draft.

As hype built for a potential national championship run throughout the offseason, Ryan Day said repeatedly that the real story of building this year’s roster wasn’t the talent the Buckeyes added through the transfer portal but the seniors who stayed in Columbus for a shot at redemption. So he certainly wants to do everything in his power to make the final chapter of that story a positive one.

“We've said it all year: They came back for a reason. So when you lose this game (against Michigan), it is completely maddening and just frustrating and all the above,” Day said on Dec. 4. “The good news is we still have a goal out in front of us. We’ve still got a chance to go do something special here with this group. But the adjustments have to be made in order to do that. We've got to get the things fixed that didn't go well in that game. And got to get that first win and then get some momentum from there. Because that's all we can do at this point.”

“Sometimes you can't accomplish all your goals, but we have the opportunity to accomplish the biggest goal possible right now.”– Cody Simon on the chance to win a national championship

While many of the Buckeyes’ seniors have had accomplished careers individually – 12 of them, including injured center Seth McLaughlin, have made an All-Big Ten team at least once – the harsh truth is that their collective time as Buckeyes will be remembered most for what they didn’t accomplish if Ohio State doesn’t make a national championship run.

Although he’s only been at Ohio State for one year while the rest of the Buckeyes’ seniors who will start against Tennessee have all been in Columbus for four or five years, Will Howard is determined to ensure that he and the rest of Ohio State’s seniors go out on the high note they’ve been chasing for their entire careers.

“There's no other option than to just empty the tank and leave it all out here because this is all we have left as college athletes,” Howard said. “Ohio State or not, this is it. I'm just excited to finish it the right way, because we have such a good group of guys, man. We have such an unbelievable team that we have here. It's a special group, and we can't go out any other way than winning it all. That's the way that I see it, man. I want this for this team so bad.”

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On a week that started with Senior Tackle at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center on Sunday and will end with a College Football Playoff game at Ohio Stadium on Saturday, Day says he’s seen that same kind of determination from Ohio State’s entire roster, especially its senior class.

Senior Tackle Tradition

Thank you again to our Seniors pic.twitter.com/23pCM2td39

— Ohio State Football (@OhioStateFB) December 15, 2024

“I wish some of you guys could have seen our Senior Tackle yesterday just to see how much these players care, how much these coaches care,” Day said Monday. “And I think this team is prepared to go play in this playoffs. I don't know the other teams, there's great teams out there, but I know this team, and I know what they're made of. And they're resilient, and they're tough, and they're mature, and again, they care a lot about Ohio State. They care about this team, this university, just like the coaching staff and myself. And we're going to play our tails off on Saturday night.”