Ohio State football: Is this the real Tommy Eichenberg?

Linebacker Tommy Eichenberg struggled through the 2021 Ohio State football regular season. When he turned in a seventeen-tackle performance in the Rose Bowl win over Utah, I wrote an article asking the question “Will the real Tommy Eichenberg please stand up?” Saturday night against Notre Dame, he turned in another head-turning showing that has me thinking “I hope this is the real Tommy Eichenberg.”

When you look at some of his stats from the regular season last year, they aren’t too bad. 47 tackles, 5 ½ tackles-for-loss, a couple of quarterback hurries, two pass breakups, and an interception. But Eichenberg far too often looked tentative and unsure and was almost a liability at times.

After three games, he lost his starting job but was on the field to begin the Rose Bowl for the injured Cody Simon. Eichenberg looked like a different player. He was confident and flying to the ball. He shot through gaps to make plays at the line of scrimmage and ran down more on the perimeter. Eleven of his seventeen tackles were solo. It was a pleasant surprise from what I saw in the regular season, but I wondered about which player was the real Tommy Eichenberg.

The redshirt junior from Cleveland, who was voted a captain by his teammates, answered that question emphatically Saturday night when he had nine tackles, two sacks, and three tackles-for-loss against Notre Dame. Once again a starter, he was an integral part of why the Ohio State defense game up just 253 total yards to the Irish and limited them to just seventy-two in the second half in his team’s 21-10 win.

That’s twenty-six tackles (seventeen of those solo), two sacks, and four tackles-for-loss in his last two games. It isn’t a surprise that he points to the Rose Bowl as the turning point. In an interview on Big Ten Today on the Big Ten Network, he said,

"“That game was important. It just boosted my confidence and allowed for me to believe in myself.”"

I hope the real Tommy Eichenberg is the one we’ve seen making plays all over the field in the Buckeyes’ last two games. If that’s the case, it is going to make us all forget the guy we saw in the 2021 regular season.