Ohio State Starting Over From Scratch Following National Title Run

Perhaps the only downside to winning a national championship is the collective basking that can stretch into the next season.

Too much banner watching and back-patting can doom a team before they ever play a game.

This is the situation the 2025 Ohio State football team doesn’t want to find itself in, and it’s the players themselves that are setting the tone to make sure their focus is on this year, not last year.

Ohio State head coach Ryan Day and strength coach Mickey Marotti are obviously instrumental in the offseason messaging to the team. Every year is a new journey, and the most beneficial thing about the previous season is the lessons that were learned.

“We had a meeting early on with our leadership committee, and one of the first things we had as we go through our first presentation of how we want to talk to our team during the winter program,” Day explained recently. “And Mick and I show the presentation to the leadership group and look for feedback. If they agree, if they don’t agree, if they want to add things, delete things, and we have a discussion. And one of the first things was ‘reinforce the culture.’ After the end of the meeting, it was, ‘We have to rebuild the culture because this team hasn’t done anything.'”

There are 20 veterans and over a dozen others of various levels of contributions from last year’s team who are not on this year’s team. Experienced starters, successful leaders, champions. There will also be over 30 new faces on the 2025 squad, meaning that about one-third of the team will be entirely new.

Many of those new faces were enrolled and on campus as the Buckeyes made their playoff run last season. They traveled with the team. They saw what went into the process and what came out. And it was all by design.

“There’s guys on this team that don’t know the culture yet,” Day said. “They were fortunate enough to be with the team during the last two games, which was great to see. And I give a lot of credit to the seniors who last year really embraced them coming to be a part of the program. I’ve seen it before in years past where there’s a little bit of a feeling, ‘Well, they’re not really part of our team. We put all the work in, it’s a little bit of a distraction.’ Our older guys felt like it was good to allow them to see what the brotherhood’s all about, to pass down what it means to be a Buckeye and our culture. Introduce them to that. And so I thought that was great.”

That decision from last year’s leaders to allow the true freshmen and transfers to tag along provided the newest Buckeyes with an experience they’ll never forget. But this year’s leaders also want to make sure that last year was nobody’s most-memorable experience as a Buckeye.

“The leaders of this group decided that they wanna take some of the national championship things down in the facility because they realized we didn’t win a national championship, last year’s team did,” Day said. “And that was a good start because that’s the right mentality to have, is that we gotta start this thing from scratch and build from there.”

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