Each week at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center, Ohio State head coach Ryan Day meets with the media ahead of the Buckeyes’ matchup that following weekend. Each week here at Land-Grant Holy Land, we will be bringing you three of the biggest storylines from said press conference.
These are three takeaways from Day’s Week 2 press conference recapping the win over Texas and previewing the matchup against Grambling State on Saturday at 3:30 p.m. ET…
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1) Julian Sayin “never flinched”
Julian Sayin’s numbers on Saturday didn’t jump off the page. Ohio State’s starting quarterback completed 13 of his pass 20 attempts for 126 yards and a touchdown. It’s the fewest passing yards for a Buckeyes starting QB since C.J. Stroud threw for only 76 yards in hurricane-like conditions at Northwestern in 2022.
Still, Sayin’s first start was incredibly impressive because of the confidence and poise he put on display against the No. 1 team in the country.
At no point during the game did Sayin ever look like he was overwhelmed or afraid of the moment. Even after a couple of dropped passes by dependable targets on the first two drives of the game, Sayin never wavered. He continued to make the correct reads, deliver an accurate ball, and kept Ohio State’s offense on schedule.
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As a result, Sayin graded out a champion in the Week 1 victory.
Day and offensive coordinator Brian Hartline didn’t ask Sayin to do a whole lot in his first career start, and that will change as the season wears along. The young quarterback did more than enough to help win the opener on Saturday, and now he can build on that performance with some lesser opponents coming up.
2) “We’ve got a lot of work to do. A ton.”
You can never be satisfied as the head coach of an upper echelon college football team. There is never such thing as ‘good enough’ when you compete at a level like Ohio State does year in and year out. Even after an impressive victory over the then-No. 1 team in the country (the Buckeyes are the new No. 1 in the latest AP Poll), there is always room to improve.
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Most of those improvements are going to be on the offensive side of the football. Ohio State scored only 14 points on Saturday, and the offense lacked much of any explosiveness. A lot of that was by design, with Day and Hartline looking to make things easy on Sayin and a new-look offensive line, but now it’s time to open up the playbook a bit.
The Buckeyes will also have to get much better on the ground. CJ Donaldson and James Peoples combined for only 87 yards on 29 carries against the Longhorns — good for three yards per carry. Donaldson looked like the better of the two, but both guys will have to continue to improve to make sure Ohio State doesn’t become one-dimensional.
Defensively, even after allowing only seven points against a highly touted offense, there are still areas that could get better. You would love to get more pressure from the defensive line when only rushing four, and the rushing defense, while not bad by any means, certainly wasn’t perfect in the opener.
It would be easy for Ohio State, fresh off a national championship and coming off five-straight victories all over teams ranked in the top-10 at the time, to sit back and rest on their laurels a bit during a stretch of ‘simple’ games, but that isn’t how you win back-to-back titles.
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Ohio State needs to use each of these weeks, no matter who the opponent, to continue to get better. The Buckeyes are the new No. 1 team in the country, but their ceiling remains even higher than what we saw on Saturday.
3) Jaylen McClain off to an “excellent start”
In terms of unsung heroes in the win over Texas, Jaylen McClain’s name more than fits the billing.
Making his first career start at safety and filling the big shoes left behind by Lathan Ransom, McClain was fantastic against Texas. The sophomore finished tied for third on the team with eight tackles, and his tackling grade of 83.8 was No. 1 on the team, per PFF.
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Coming into the season, it wasn’t clear who would win the starting safety job opposite Caleb Downs. The battle was between McClain and Malik Hartford, both of whom played similar snaps a year ago. Downs and Ransom played virtually every meaningful down in 2024, with the duo each clearing 800 snaps. McClain was way behind them at 106 snaps, followed by Hartford at 94.
Hartford, however, is a year older and the much higher-rated prospect. The Ohio native was the No. 11 safety and the No. 3 in-state prospect in the 2023 class. McClain, meanwhile, was a three-star prospect out of New Jersey in the 2024 class as the No. 36 safety in the country.
That didn’t matter on Saturday, as McClain earned the starting nod and played every defensive snap in the game, one of four players in the secondary to never come off the field (Downs, Jermaine Mathews Jr., Davison Igbinosun). This isn’t a knock on Hartford, who will likely rotate in moving forward, but McClain was just that good.
“I think [McClain] works well with Caleb [Downs]. I think Caleb has helped him build his confidence at a young age,” Day said during his presser. “He’s a good tackler, he sees things, he plays downhill, he’s fast. He makes good decisions, he plays special teams at a high level. He’s got a bright future ahead of him. […] He’s going to be a big part of this thing.”
