Ohio State Football: Who will return punts this year?

The Ohio State football team hasn’t had a truly dangerous punt returner in a long time. Garrett Wilson was a threat, but he never scored a return touchdown. The Buckeyes haven’t had a stud returner since Ted Ginn Jr. back in the mid-2000s. They had Jaxon Smith-Njigba at it last year.

With JSN taking a bigger role in the offense, it doesn’t make sense for him to return punts this year. He’s too important to the offense to be possibly injured on special teams. Even more than that, he needs to be rested enough so that he can play as many snaps as possible on offense.

Emeka Egbuka returned kicks last year. There’s a pretty good chance he does that again and won’t likely add returning punts to his docket. In fact, the guy most likely to return punts has only seen the field on defense so far in his career, but might not this year.

Cam Martinez has been the guy returning punts with the first unit so far in Spring practice. This is something he excelled at in high school and has a lot of talent doing. This would be his first time doing it with the Ohio State football team, but the sophomore is looking to make an impact doing it.

Martinez is likely going to be a backup on defense, so this is his chance to see the field. Ryan Day wants him to make an impact somewhere on the field this year. This seems like the best place for him to be able to do it. How good he’ll be remains to be seen.

We’ll get our first true look at how good he is at this new role at the Spring game next weekend. I’m excited to see if he can bring a breakaway element to the special teams unit.