College Football

Big Ten Preview: Ohio State features new QB C.J. Stroud, same dominant aura

Updated Aug. 27, 2021 10:10 a.m. ET

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By RJ Young
FOX Sports College Football Writer

Editor's Note: The story of the 2021 college football season, like several of the seasons before it, is David vs. Goliath. In each of the Power 5 conferences, there is a very familiar prohibitive favorite and defending champion. As he previews the five conferences this week, RJ Young will break down the behemoth in each league and identify the potential Davids who could shake up the College Football Playoff race this fall. 

In the past 20 years, the fourth-ranked Ohio State Buckeyes have accounted for more than half of all Big Ten championships. 

Now, try stopping them from winning their fifth in a row.

Buckeyes coach Ryan Day has yet to lose a single game in Big Ten competition. He’s 23-2 as Head Ball Coach In Charge in Columbus, and those losses have each come against the best competition the sport could offer: 2019 national runner-up Clemson and 2020 national champion Alabama.

The Buckeyes have been so dominant in the past decade of Big Ten play, when you discovered that the Associated Press preseason poll ranked five Big Ten teams, you could be forgiven for suggesting the math would work like this: one team to make the Playoff and the other four to build Ohio State's résumé.

Day has never finished worse than No. 3 in rankings that matters, despite what Dabo Swinney might have to say about it.

In 2020, the Buckeyes made an emphatic statement against Swinney’s Tigers, punching Clemson 49-28, in the semifinal of the College Football Playoff in which former Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields put on a virtuoso performance that amounted to pouring sugar in Clemson’s open wound.

Fields became the second Ohio State quarterback drafted in the first round in three years after Dwayne Haskins, in 2019, ended a run of 37 years without a Buckeyes signal-caller being selected in the first.

The condition that Urban Meyer left the program in for Day, his then-offensive coordinator, was pristine to begin with. Since, Day and his staff have made some improvements and added players that put them not only in a position to win the Big Ten title again this year but to contend for a College Football Playoff spot for the third time in three years.

The largest challenge Ohio State faces headed into 2021 was waged in its quarterback room in preseason. With the late edition of five-star recruit Quinn Ewers — who is not likely to play more than four games in mop-up time this season — the Buckeyes count four blue-chip quarterbacks on their roster at a moment when many programs are lucky to have one.

The contest in the spring began with former five-star and true freshman Kyle McCord and redshirt freshmen Jack Miller and C.J. Stroud. Stroud separated late, which is in keeping with his modus operandi since high school.

He was the last quarterback invited to what’s billed as the most prestigious quarterback competition in the country, the Elite 11 Finals, and put on a show in Frisco, Texas. When the competition was finished, he walked out of The Star with the Elite MVP trophy former Super Bowl-champion quarterback Trent Dilfer pressed into his hands.

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He arrived at Ohio State with that hype. Despite not throwing a single pass in 2020, Stroud is expected to be what Lewis Hamilton is to Formula One Team Mercedes-Benz. The pressure will be on for him to lead an offense in which every single skill player is capable of turning a routine hand-off or catch into six points on any play.

Heading into the season, it’s difficult to believe there’s a team capable of unseating Ohio State from its throne — Lord knows 2020 Northwestern got close — but, if it’s going to happen, these are the teams most prepared for the task.

BIG TEN CONTENDERS:

INDIANA

The No. 17 Hoosiers are feeling themselves this season, and they should be. This is the first time the Hoosiers have been ranked in the AP preseason poll since 1969. It's a feat so astounding that Notre Dame and Purdue fans alike had to look up where Indiana is.

Quarterback Michael Penix Jr. not only returns but returns after throwing for nearly 500 yards against Ohio State last season. Wide receiver Ty Fryfogle returns to try to claim the title of best receiver in the league after catching 37 passes for 721 yards (19.5 yards per catch) or just 10 yards short of averaging 100 yards receiving a game.

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With LB Micah McFadden back for IU coach Tom Allen’s defense, the Hoosiers believe they have talent enough on both sides of the ball to contend. 

But their schedule dictates they cannot come out slow, and they cannot let up. IU opens against No. 18 Iowa and has ranked opponents No. 8 Cincinnati and Big Ten East foes No. 18 Penn State and OSU, too.

PENN STATE

Penn State is absolutely capable of beating Ohio State. It just hasn’t for four consecutive years.

That includes the Nittany Lions’ 11-win season in 2019, which included losses to the best Minnesota team anybody had seen in 50 years and an Ohio State team that ran the regular season undefeated. And that Nittany Lions team had the services of Journey Brown, Jayson Oweh and Micah Parsons.

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However, this team returns the quarterback on that 2019 team in Sean Clifford. Maybe a third-straight change in offensive coordinator, this time to former Buckeyes quarterbacks coach Mike Yurcich, can help him return to that form. 

If so, perhaps this is the team that will give James Franklin just his second-ever win against Ohio State in eight opportunities.

WISCONSIN

The Badgers are the chalky pick to come out of the Big Ten West, especially since pundits like me are given to looking at past history to predict future events.

Since Big Ten Championship games started in 2011, Wisconsin has played in as many as Ohio State. Both have six appearances harkening back to the Leaders and Legends era, which was shelved just before League of Legends took the world by storm. 

With Graham Mertz returning to start at quarterback in a backfield that will feature running back Jalen Berger and a Jim Leonhard-coached defense, there’s reason to believe Badgers fans will jump around at Camp Randall come December.

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IOWA

No. 18 Iowa hasn’t played for a conference championship since 2015 and hasn’t won a Big Ten Championship since 2004. For perspective, that was the same year Hawkeyes offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz was a junior on the team, and current starting quarterback Spencer Petras was 5 years old. 

The Hawkeyes' schedule features four preseason Top-5 teams, and even if they managed to win the Big Ten West, they’d have to play Ohio State — er, I mean the Big Ten East champion in the title game. It could be worse, though. Just look to conference-rival Nebraska.

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Pick: Ohio State

The most dominant Big Ten program of the past 20 years will add another conference championship trophy to its case. 

It’s not just that the Buckeyes have become the NFL’s favorite defensive lineman factory. It’s that they’ve added the No. 1 wide receiver in the country for the past two cycles (Julian Fleming and Emeka Egbuka), the No. 1 running back in the 2021 cycle (TreVeyon Henderson), No. 1 interior offensive lineman (Donovan Jackson), and the No. 1 and No. 2 defensive linemen in the 2021 cycle (J.T. Tuimoloau and Jack Sawyer).

And none of them will start 2021 at the top of the depth chart.

There’s being loaded, and then there’s what Day and his staff have done — not to just win the Big Ten, but to continue to compete for national championships.

RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast "The No. 1 Ranked Show with RJ Young." Follow him on Twitter at @RJ_Young, and subscribe to "The RJ Young Show" on YouTube. He is not on a StepMill.

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