Ohio State football: Three players to watch vs. Notre Dame
By Ryan Stano
How will the Ohio State football team use Jack Sawyer?
As a true freshman, Jack Sawyer showed some flashes of greatness in 2021. His dominant Spring Game got everyone hyped up about how good he could be. In the end, he finished with 13 tackles and 3 sacks last year in somewhat limited playing time. That playing time will increase this season.
Sawyer is going to be playing the new “Jack” position on the defensive line. That means he’s going to be used as a hybrid defensive lineman/linebacker. There are times when he will be rushing the passer and other times when he will be dropping back into coverage.
Saturday’s game will be the first time that we see how this new position is utilized with this team. We saw an extremely vanilla version of it in the Spring Game but that didn’t tell us much. Oklahoma State’s film gave us a little more, but that’s still with completely different personnel.
Sawyer is a very versatile player and can do a lot of different things. He’s the perfect guy to play this type of position. I’m going to be very interested to see how he’s used on Saturday against Notre Dame. A good game from him means that they’ve successfully confused the Fighting Irish on what he’s doing from play to play.
I expect Sawyer to have at least one sack in this game. He’s trained hard in the offseason to make sure he’s an impact player for this defense in 2022. I expect him to be just that. I also expect this final player to watch on Saturday to be an impact player this year as well.