COLUMBUS, Ohio — There’s winning a national championship, and then there’s what Ohio State accomplished last season. While the trophy will look the same in the display case, the Buckeyes’ path to glory stands apart as one of the most remarkable journeys in college football history.
On a recent episode of Buckeye Talk, hosts Stephen Means, Stefan Krajisnik, and Andrew Gillis dissected what made this championship run transcend a typical title season. The consensus? It wasn’t just that they won – it was who they beat and how they did it.
“How much of it, when you talk about this season and the run they had isn’t just the fact that they went on a run, but what they had to go through to win the national championship,” Means posed. “Because I do feel like the fact that they beat all but one of the top eight teams in the country this year probably plays a role into why we’re talking about this season the way we did.”
For coach Ryan Day, this championship run delivered more than a trophy — it provided redemption and silenced growing criticism.
“There was an element too of Ryan Day kind of getting that monkey off his back — that he can’t win the big one,” explained Krajisnik. “That was kind of starting to linger after he lost to Oregon and then you lose to Michigan. And there was a little bit of that, not to the James Franklin extent, but it was starting to cloud, I think, a little bit.”
What makes this title run historically significant is the gauntlet Ohio State faced. Tennessee, Oregon, Texas, and Notre Dame represented the most challenging path any national champion has ever navigated.
“It’s one of the better stories, I think, in college football history versus it just being another national champion,” Means emphasized. “They were in the darkest place they could get into and then they literally played the hardest possible opponent in every round that you could have played.”
The “darkest place” Means referenced was Ohio State’s loss to Michigan – their fourth-straight defeat in the rivalry. That context makes the championship story even more compelling, as the Buckeyes transformed utter disappointment into championship determination.
Even when the podcast hosts explored how the playoff might have unfolded under the newly adopted straight-seeding format, they reached the same conclusion: Ohio State’s path would have remained extraordinarily difficult, perhaps even more challenging.
“I think this underscores maybe the impressiveness of Ohio State’s run because we just went through and I think the run that we talked about got tougher,” Gillis said. “Like you might argue that it got tougher if you played Oregon and Georgia and Texas instead of Oregon and Texas and Notre Dame.”
What separates this Ohio State championship from many others is that it offers more than just the result – it provides a complete narrative arc that football fans can appreciate regardless of their team allegiance. From disappointment to redemption, from criticism to vindication, from doubt to dominance, the Buckeyes authored a story that will be referenced for decades.
As college football evolves with its new playoff format, Ohio State’s championship run stands as a fitting final chapter to the previous era – a reminder that while systems and structures may change, transcendent teams create legacies that endure regardless of format.
Here’s the podcast for this week:
Note: Artificial intelligence was used to help generate this story from the Buckeye Talk Podcast by cleveland.com. Visitors to cleveland.com have asked for more text stories based on website podcast discussions.
