We’ve heard it before. At a place like Ohio State, you don’t rebuild, you reload. After four-straight Big Ten championships and a slew of players being sent to the NFL on a yearly basis, that couldn’t be more true in Columbus. In fact, you can go way back in history and see that more often than not, the Buckeyes are able to compete for trophies and trinkets no matter what’s coming back.
Further proof (if that’s what you want to call it), is the preseason SP+ rankings that ESPN just unveiled. Ohio State loses Justin Fields, Trey Sermon, a couple of members of the offensive line, and its entire starting linebacking corps, yet is still rated very highly in the predictive formula for results on the field resident beautiful mind guru Bill Connelly uses.
We’ll spoil the main surprise and tell you that no, the Buckeyes are not rated No. 1 when considering things like returning production, recent recruiting, and recent history, but they are still pretty high on the list. In fact, Ohio State is No. 4 behind just Alabama, Clemson, and Oklahoma. What else is new?
Here is how the top 25 looks like …