The Ohio State football program has tried to evolve with the times. They were able to win a national championship in 2024 on the strength of several senior players. Will Howard, Jack Sawyer, Emeka Egbuka, and other seniors played a big part in winning a national title.
Indiana showed this year that older players help win games. They went 16-0 by having a ton of older guys on the team, including several guys who have played more than four years of college football. Some programs believe now that building around older rosters is the best way to win big.
The GM of the Buckeyes is Mark Pantoni, and he is in charge of navigating all of this. He has tried to figure out the best way to build a roster in the NIL landscape. How he builds a roster for the Ohio State Buckeyes might be changing in the next few years.
The Ohio State football program might change how their roster is built
While speaking on The Program With Woj, Pantoni acknowledged that Indiana's success could change how the Buckeyes build their roster moving forward.
I think the "Indiana model" in football has shown us that having older players, having an older team, does mean something. And so philosophically, we are trying to determine, okay, how much financials are we going to put into the high school world now. How big is the high school class going to look now? Is it better in the long run, or in the one-season model, to go into the portal and take older, more proven guys rather than try to pay a lot of money to get kids here out of high school, and then they're probably not playing a lot in year one or year two, and then you have a lot of dead money?"
It seems that the Buckeyes might be shifting towards using the portal more in future seasons, although they only added a couple of dozen players in this cycle. Pantoni makes it clear that elite recruits out of high school will still be at the top of their board every year.
Adding older players has clearly worked for the last two national champions. The Buckeyes need to figure that out for the next few seasons if they want to win a title again. The hope is that the offensive line has developed into an older, more refined group, and that should help them get where they want to go.