With great power (or a National Championship) comes great responsibility. In other words, when your team keeps winning like the No. 1 Ohio State Buckeyes are, people start looking to your coaches and assistants to fill other roles.
As teams like the Penn State Nittany Lions, LSU Tigers, and Florida Gators become more and more desperate to fill their current head coaching vacancies, names like Brian Hartline crop up as potential candidates.
Hartline, the Buckeyes' current offensive coordinator, has been tied to the job with the Nittany Lions. However, Bruce Feldman, a college football insider, doesn't think the Ohio State OC is going anywhere.
Don't worry, Brian Hartline is going to stay in Columbus
Feldman didn't have any inside information, but what he did have was logic, plain and simple. He brought the argument forward that it's illogical for Hartline to leave the Buckeyes.
Why would an offensive coordinator risk leaving the "safety net" of Ohio State to simply try out being a college football head coach, something that Hartline has never done?
Hartline joined Ohio State head coach Ryan Day's staff in 2017 as an offensive quality control assistant. Since then, he has worked his way up the Buckeyes' coaching totem pole and was promoted to offensive coordinator before this season.
Bruce Feldman on the Todd McShay podcast talked about Hartline and Penn State. Feldman said that it may boil down to it's too big of a gamble on a first year coach that has the safety net of OSU. Stakes are high at PSU and the next coach will need to rebuild what Franklin left.
— JBook. (@JBook_37) November 19, 2025
Feldman is correct, it just doesn't make sense for Hartline to risk his steady job with the Buckeyes to take over a program that hasn't even won a Big Ten Championship since 2016, much less a National Championship since 1986.
Buckeye fans can take a deep breath and relax; their worries about Hartline heading out the door should be squashed, for now, at the very least.
Hartline, Day, and the rest of the Ohio State program are on a beeline for another title run, and that is exactly why people get into this kind of job to begin with.
Over the next two weeks, the No. 1 Buckeyes have to take on the unranked Rutgers Scarlet Knights and then the No. 18 Michigan Wolverines. After that, it's only a Big Ten title game and a berth in the College Football Playoffs on the horizon.