Ohio State Placed Emphasis On Developing Leadership During Offseason Workouts

The Buckeyes mostly attributed the lack of leadership on last year's squad to youthfulness.

While spring practice is often viewed as the unofficial start to the upcoming season, it’s actually the seven weeks of winter workouts leading up to it that sets the tone for the Ohio State football program.

In looking back at what went wrong last season, offensive coordinator Kevin Wilson noticed a lack of leadership within his unit as early as February. That carried over into the fall, when the Buckeyes lost to Oregon and Michigan and needed a second-half comeback to beat Utah in the Rose Bowl.

“I think, initially, we didn’t do maybe as good of job as we needed to getting our players in positions of setting the tone,” Wilson said during his media availability on Tuesday.

This offseason, though, Ohio State addressed that head on.

“Not to get into too much of what we did, (but) we decided leadership was the No. 1 thing we needed to get done in this offseason,” head coach Ryan Day said. “Through a process, we ended up explaining to everyone what leadership was and asked, ‘Who wants to be the leaders of the team?’”

The team voted 24 players onto a leadership committee, while the remaining players were split into 12 units. Two leaders were assigned to each unit and the goal was to hold the others accountable for their actions during winter workouts.

“(There was) a lot of competition,” Day said. “If somebody was late, there was community service on the weekend for the whole group, so a lot of accountability and a lot of feedback.

“I think this is probably the best we’ve done in an offseason of forging leadership. Not that all 24 were great leaders – some of them were, some of them weren’t – but there was a lot more leadership based on what we did in the last seven weeks than we’ve had in a while, and that was encouraging.”

Day and Wilson attribute the lack of leadership on last year’s squad to the pandemic, which placed restrictions on practice, meetings and the overall time the players could spent together, as well as their overall inexperience on the field.

After all, Ohio State was breaking in a first-year starter at quarterback in C.J. Stroud, who had not yet thrown a pass in college, and several new starters on defense, including the entire linebacking corps.

“Part of it was just how young we were,” Day said. “We were really green and guys were just trying to get lined up and play and do well. But when you have a team that has the experience that we have coming back, now you can put some more focus on leadership.

“That’s what happened in the second half of the Rose Bowl is the leadership stepped up at halftime. We didn’t have that (against Michigan), it’s just the truth. When you think about the (2019) Big Ten Championship Game against Wisconsin, we’re kind of reeling at halftime, we come out and play really well in the second half.

“There’s going to be opportunities like that and we really wanted to focus on that over the last seven weeks and try to create as many of those situations as possible so that when we get our backs up against the wall, we need guys to step up. We’ve really made a lot of progress there, but the proof will be in the pudding moving forward.”

That said, Wilson believes they’re already seeing results that will pay dividends for the Buckeyes down the road.

"Short term, it’s off to a great start,” Wilson said. “We’ll see when the bullets are flying, the game’s going on, it’s loud and we have to make a stop or have to get a first down or touchdown.

“That’s when you like to see all those things, not just when we’ve got our toes behind the line for a drill, but when it’s 4th-and-1 and really loud, you can’t hear in certain places we play, so that we can make a critical play and win another championship.”

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