Does the Ohio State Football team have a locker room problem?

I shouldn’t even have to write something like this. The day after the Ohio State football team destroyed Akron 59-7 and actually put together a complete effort should be talking about what happened on the field. Instead, the bigger story is what happened off the field.

The K’Vaughan Pope nonsense is drowning out that great performance by the Buckeyes. After his bizarre sideline incident and his tweet following his exile to the locker room, it seems as though there is clear unhappiness among some players on Ryan Day’s team.

Pope isn’t the only player to take to Twitter about his dislike for playing time. Ryan Watts also showed his displeasure about decreased playing time by liking multiple tweets about his sudden disappearance from the field. These aren’t the only problems with players recently either.

Most of you are aware of the incident regarding an Ohio State media company paying a player to be a source within the program. That player was then kicked off the team and the “reporters” who did this had their credentials revoked and were fired from the site they worked for.

Dallas Gant also entered his name in the transfer portal earlier in the week, leaving the Buckeyes even thinner at linebacker, a position they don’t have experience at anyway. Transfers aren’t uncommon, but it’s another off-the-field incident.

These incidents beg the question; does the Ohio State football team have a problem within the locker room? Does Day have control over his team? Based on the things that have happened over the last week, it doesn’t seem that he does. It’s something that is a big issue.

Players acting like this is indicative of a larger issue. That issue is that Day simply can’t make every player on the team happy. He can’t play every player as much as they want. It also might underscore that Day doesn’t know how to keep these issues in-house or keep them from happening at all.

I’m not ready to outright say that Day has lost complete control of this team. Incidents pop up with every program from time to time. But if he doesn’t do something very quickly, things could spiral in a very ugly way with this program both on and off the field.

This week of press conferences will be very interesting to watch and listen to.