by Patrick Zier | Jan 21, 2025 |
This was not what they had signed up for. They had lost to Michigan – again. There was no Big Ten championship – again. And their coach was on the hot seat – again. The standards are high at Ohio State. Winning 11 games three years in a row means nothing if you don’t have anything to show for it except the wins, and Ohio State had nothing to show for it except the wins. No victories over its arch rival, no conference championships, no shot at the college football playoffs.
In today’s world, this is when college players start to bail. There is an old saying that there is no I in TEAM. Wrong. Ever since money started turning the college game into a mini-NFL, it’s all about the I. Miami’s Cam Ward, standing on the sidelines during the second half of the Pop-Tart Bowl, a 42-41 loss to Iowa State, after he had set the Division 1 record for most touchdown passes in a career during the first half, is the new standard.
So, it was reasonable to expect that, after the end of the 2023 season, with the lure of the NFL and possible greener pastures elsewhere, there would be some roster shuffling at Ohio State. The heart of this Ohio State team is its 2021 recruiting class, players like defensive end Jack Sawyer, receiver Emeka Egbuka, guard Donovan Jackson, running back TreVeyon Henderson and others.
Quarterback Kyle McCord was also a member of the recruiting class of ’21, but when Ohio State Coach Ryan Day would not promise him the starting job for this year, he left. And he was really the only player of consequence who did. Not only did the rest stay, they also played in the Cotton Bowl against Missouri, having decided, more or less as a group, that their legacy would not end on this sour note.
See, Ohio State has one thing going for it that is missing now at most schools. Players like Sawyer and Jackson and most others come to Ohio State not just because of the money; eight Buckeyes are listed among the highest paid college football players in the country according to On3’s NIL rankings, but because they actually want to play for Ohio State. Nineteen of this year’s starting 22 originally signed with Ohio State.
And through the years, a winning culture has been established there, a certain way of doing things, an understanding of what is expected of you when you don the Scarlet and Gray. When transfers are brought in such as quarterback Will Howard, they pick up on this, adapt to it.
With the revolving door that now exists in college football and the constant flow of players coming and going, few schools have this to fall back on. And the recruiting class of ’21 was an especially dedicated group, closer and more tight knit than most and determined to put Ohio State back on top.
When you examine Ohio State’s press conferences before the Notre Dame game, the players’ closeness and determination clearly stands out, and no one epitomizes it better than Sawyer. “It means everything to me,” Sawyer, who established his name forever in Ohio State lore with his scoop and score against Texas, commented. “Putting on the Scarlet and Gray is a dream come true, and the rest of the guys will say the same thing,” he declared.
“I remember being a little kid running around in the back yard every weekend with an Ohio State jersey on wanting to be like the guys I saw on TV.” Sawyer recalled that he “never took it (the jersey) off on weekends. My mom would be mad. It had grass stains on it and she had just washed it,” he said.
Jackson, one of the best offensive linemen in college ranks, echoed Sawyer’s sentiments. “A lot of us decided to come back for moments like this,” he said of the championship game. “You decided to commit to Ohio State to play in games like this.”
So if you were going to beat Ohio State this year, you not only needed to have top end talent, you needed to match that intensity. After another loss to Michigan, Ohio State reached a turning point in its season. It could easily have cratered then, but led by the Sawyers and Jacksons and Hendersons, the ’21 group, the players used the defeat to fuel their desire to save the season. And they did.
No team in college football history is a more deserving champion. To win the title, Ohio State beat Tennessee, the No. 7 team in the country; Oregon, No. 1; Texas, No. 4 and Notre Dame, No. 3, over four straight weeks. That’s never been done before, may never be done again.
“I think it’s a testament to everyone’s hard work in the athletic program, not just the players,” Jackson said. “With this extended format, it means a lot more games, a lot more high profile games. It means your body is banged up. You’re mentally exhausted, but at the end of the day, you want to go out there and win.”
They did. And if you knew anything at all about the make-up of this team, its quiet confidence, that shouldn’t have been a surprise. Certainly it wasn’t to Sawyer and Jackson and the recruiting class of ’21. It didn’t surprise them, but it did give them a lot of satisfaction. Job well done.
by Patrick Zier | Jan 11, 2025 |
Josh Berry is the odd man out, but he shouldn’t be. Berry, along with Stewart-Haas teammates Noah Gregson, Chase Briscoe and Ryan Preece, was left scrambling for a ride after Stewart-Haas, owned by former driver Tony Stewart and businessman Gene Haas, shut down operations following the 2024 season.
Not that it came as a huge surprise. Rumors started circulating about its demise a few years ago when the team’s performance began to fall off despite the fact it had full factory backing from Ford and strong sponsorship from a number of major corporations.
But Stewart, a three-time Cup champion and pretty much the go-to guy on the competition side and Haas, who founded the team originally, began to be more involved in other types of racing and the NASCAR program lacked leadership as a result.
Stewart became interested in drag racing and also bought some short tracks and Haas was concentrating on building a Formula One team, all of which left little time to supervise their NASCAR entry. Additionally, Ford support was ending in 2024.
With a lack of leadership at the top and drivers and everyone in the organization wondering what would happen next, Stewart-Haas started to drift into mediocrity and was unable to keep up, especially when NASCAR came out with the NextGen car in 2022.
The NextGen car was different from anything NASCAR had run before. Instead of being able to build their own cars, the teams were now required to buy virtually everything from single sources suppliers and were not allowed to modify the parts and pieces. Even Ford’s top team, Team Penske, had problems adapting to the change and those problems were compounded at Stewart-Haas.
Using the OldGuySport Competition Index we can measure how Stewart-Haas performed relative to Penske. The OGS Competition Index is a better indicator than the NASCAR point system because the NASCAR point system is still essentially based on order of finish and doesn’t indicate how the teams performed on the track.
Additionally, OGS does not use results from Daytona, Talladega or Atlanta because super speedway racing depends primary on luck. Where you finish depends on two things: avoiding the big wreck, which can happen at any point in the race, and being in the right line on the last lap, which is shear guess work.
Starting with 2022, the year the NextGen car first hit the track, Team Penske’s three drivers, Ryan Blaney, Joey Logano and Austion Cindric, scored 770 points on the OGS scale. Logano had 434, Blaney 274 and Cindric 62. The four Stewart-Haas drivers had 424. Kevin Harvick had 246, Briscoe 165, Aric Almirola 9 and Cole Custer 4. In other words, by himself, Logano outpointed the entire Stewart-Haas team.
In 2023, the Stewart-Haas foursome of Harvick (124), Briscoe (48), Almirola (42) and Preece (25) managed just 239 points. That compared with Penske’s Blaney (311), Logano (202) and Cindric (1), a total of 514. Again, one Penske driver, Blaney, had more points than the Stewart-Haas foursome combined.
Once it was formally announced that Stewart-Haas was shutting down, the team fell apart. The focus was no longer on preparing and driving race cars, rather everyone was scrambling to find a new job. The performance on track was pitiful. Briscoe scored just 104 points to lead the way, Berry had 74, Preece 20 and Gregson one, a total of just 199.
In all, 12 drivers on the OGS Competition Index had more points than the Stewart-Haas team combined and a 13th, Ross Chastain with 183 points, was close. The three Penske drivers, Blaney (392), Logano (250) and Cindric (101) put up 743.
While Stewart-Haas was still considered a tier one team when it folded, towards the end its performance never demonstrated that. Briscoe was the most experienced and consistent Stewart-Haas driver, and he had won a race in 2022, but all four had bounced around with mediocre teams and from a talent standpoint, were relative unknowns.
The only one who had shown the ability to drive an elite car was Berry, who was in his first full season as a Cup driver.
In 2023 Hendrick Motorsports, arguably the strongest team in NASCAR, need a replacement for Chase Elliott, who had suffered an off-track injury. It is extremely difficult for a driver to move into an elite car and run competitively because the replacement driver has no chemistry with the team, and almost everybody put in that position fails.
Berry didn’t, despite the fact he had almost no experience at the Cup level. Over five races, he scored a 10th place finish at Los Vegas and amazingly was second at Richmond, proving he was ready to run at the highest level. When Hendrick’s Alex Bowman got hurt, Berry came back again and, in four starts, he had a 10th at Dover and won the NASCAR All-Star qualifying race to get into the main event.
But when Joe Gibbs needed a replacement for Martin Truex, he chose Briscoe. And when RFK (Roush-Fenway-Keselowski), Ford’s new top tier team, needed a third driver, it went with Preece, who has done absolutely nothing at the Cup level. “Ryan Preece is who we identified from day one when discussing this third entry,” RFK President Steve Newmark commented. Meanwhile Haas started a new one-car team and went with Custer, although that is not a truly competitive ride.
And Berry? Well, he ended up taking a sideways step, signing with the Wood brothers. Years ago, the Wood brothers were one of NASCAR’s big three, along with Petty Enterprises and Holman-Moody. Cale Yarborough drove for the Woods, Richard Petty drove for Petty Enterprises and David Pearson piloted the Holman-Moody entry. But this is simply not a competitive car, despite its alignment with Penske, and in recent years it has only won on super speedways.
And Berry, who is probably the best driver of the four, will have a hard time changing that.
