While Brian Hartline is very well known as a player, position coach, and now top assistant, the Buckeyes have two new coaches with less obvious histories coming to Ohio State. Billy Fessler is the new quarterbacks coach at Ohio State, while Tyler Bowen is the new offensive line coach for the scarlet and gray. Billy Fessler isn’t completely unknown to Ohio State, so we’ll start with him.
Fessler spent 2022 as a quarterbacks coach at Akron. He was also an offensive coordinator there in 2023 before beginning to head west in early 2024. He didn't stay long as he followed Chip Kelly to Columbus from Los Angeles. He was a player at Penn State from 2014 through 2017.
In 2019, he was a graduate assistant under his offensive coordinator at Penn State, Joe Moorhead, when Moorhead was the head coach at Mississippi State. When Moorhead was let go by Mississippi State, Fessler came to Ohio State.
He finished out his time as a graduate assistant with the Buckeyes in 2020 and 2021, when he worked with Buckeye quarterbacks and legends Justin Fields and CJ Stroud. The quarterbacks he’s worked with outside of Ohio State have been Tommy Stevens (Mississippi State), and DJ Irons (Akron).
Now, back in Columbus, Fessler will be working with two quarterbacks with tremendous potential, Julian Sayin and Tavien St. Clair. His track record with Buckeye quarterbacks is pretty good with Fields, Stroud, and Will Howard.
While Fessler got into coaching in 2018, Bowen started his career in 2010. Bowen played at Maryland from 2007 through 2009 and spent a lot of time as an assistant at Maryland and Penn State. Most recently, he was the offensive coordinator at Virginia Tech for the past three seasons.
A good general indicator of how well an offensive line is playing as a unit is how many sacks it allows and how many yards the team rushes for. Tyler Bowen’s Virginia Tech has allowed an average of 30.6 sacks a season during his time as offensive coordinator, compared to Ohio State’s 17.3 in the same time frame and stronger conference. Virginia Tech has averaged 2,001.6 yards per season to Ohio State’s 2,322.6.
It's important to remember that, generally speaking, both Bowen and Fessler will be working with much better talent and support at Ohio State than at their previous teams. While these may not be obvious, immediate home run hires, they are who a coach who just won a national championship picked.
These weren’t panic hires by Ryan Day. These are guys who Day believes will give the Buckeyes their best shot at repeating as national champions in 2025.