Defending Champion Buckeyes 'Back At Zero' As Fall Camp Looms

The Ohio State Buckeyes are college football’s defending national champions, but OSU junior safety Caleb Downs understands that that fact is only so applicable to a new season.

Everybody that has returned from last season will have that experience to look back on. They all understand what it took to make that happen.

But that experience doesn’t bring something tangible like points or first downs. It doesn’t give the Buckeyes an advantage that no other team can access this season. There are no shortcuts in this process, and the next step in that process begins on Thursday with the opening of fall camp.

“Oh, I’m super excited about fall camp,” Downs said Tuesday at Big Ten Media Days. “Just to see where we’re at, see where we’re at as a team, seeing the improvements that we made and how we’ve tried to push ourselves to get better this offseason. So I’m excited to see where we’re at as a defense, as an offense. And then just excited to see myself in the offseason that we’ve had.”

For Caleb Downs and his teammates, the start of fall camp is simply the next phase of the present that they are living in. They aren’t looking to the past like fans or media. The focus is on the day at hand in preparation for what’s awaiting them on the horizon.

The days will go by fast enough without skipping any steps.

“I feel like it’s just putting ourselves back at zero, giving ourselves the opportunity to earn something new, to not have last year hanging over our head,” Downs said of camp. “Just the opportunity to say, we’re going to work for whatever we can work for this year. And we’re going to try to be the best that we can. That’s all that we can control.”

When the Buckeyes won the national title in 2014, they returned a lot of those players and they played as if there was a certain level of satisfaction with what they had done a year earlier.

This year, the Buckeyes have lost eight starters on each side of the ball, so that same level of satisfaction shouldn’t apply to this year’s team. There will be new starters, new roles, and a handful of veterans finally getting to show what they can do.

This is all good news for the Buckeyes according to Caleb Downs.

“I feel like there’s a hunger,” Downs said. “We’ve worked out vigorously trying to get better, trying to better ourselves physically and mentally. Just find ways to chop wood, carry water, push ourselves to get better at the little things every day and not just focus on the grandiose scheme of, ‘oh, we want to win this game, we want to win this game,’ but every day find ways to get better at something.”

The Buckeyes will need to make the most of each of those days in camp because they open with Texas. This could be a 1 vs. 2 matchup to open the season. Ohio State will need to be on point in that first game, but for a championship-level team, that’s how the preparation should be anyway according to Downs.

“Either way, you’ve got to come into the first game prepared or ready to play,. So I wouldn’t say it changes much at the end of the day,” Downs said of opening against Texas. “If I told you that we prepared a different way for a certain team than another team, you would say, ‘why would you do that? That doesn’t make sense.’ So just trying to prepare at an elite level every game and make sure that our preparation is the same every week.”