Ohio State football: Predicting the schedule, amount of wins
By Ryan Stano
The Ohio State football team’s season kicks off exactly one week from today. It’s been a long 8 months since we last saw this team play in the Rose Bowl. It was a captivating win that should help them have some confidence early in this season as well.
Since that final game, the Buckeyes have three new coaches on defense and one on offense. It was a pretty big overhaul of the coaching staff for Ryan Day, the first time he’s had to do that sort of thing. Now, he gets to see how those moves will pan out.
Since there is college football being played today and the Buckeyes are one week out, it’s time for us to take a look at the schedule and break down how we think this Ohio State football team will do this year. There are three levels to the schedule; the non-conference, conference, and postseason.
Ohio State has a more favorable schedule than they have had in recent years. They get all of their toughest games at home, although they do play Penn State and Michigan State on the road this year. But they also get Notre Dame, Wisconsin, and TTUN at home.
We start with the non-conference portion of the schedule and figure out how the Buckeyes do.
The Ohio State football team goes undefeated through the non-conference slate
There’s no doubt that the season-opener is the toughest portion of the Ohio State football team’s non-conference slate. Notre Dame is a top-five team for a reason and might end up being the toughest team that the Buckeyes face all season long.
The fact that it’s the very first game helps the Buckeyes. They have gotten to prepare for them all offseason long and have studied all kinds of film on them. There’s no reason that Day shouldn’t have his team prepared for 7:30 next Saturday. He has the more talented team.
Arkansas State and Toledo are the next two games and are candidates to be blown out of the Shoe. Neither should show any kind of trouble for the Buckeyes. As long as they get through that tough opener, they should get through the non-conference part of the schedule without a blemish.
The conference part of the schedule is a completely different animal though.