Buckeye Talk: Ohio State podcast by cleveland.com

On this Wednesday Buckeye Talk, Doug Lesmerises, Nathan Baird and Stephen Means are coming off interviews with defensive coordinator Jim Knowles and five Ohio State linebackers, and there's a lot to discuss. Among the topics covered: Start to 17:30 -- An injury at cornerback and the effect it could have 17:30 to 28:44 -- A role for Kourt Williams? 28:44 to 31:24 -- Crypto in a convenience store 31...

On this Tuesday Buckeye Talk, Doug Lesmerises, Nathan Baird and Stephen Means are talking offensive line after meeting with eight Ohio State offensive linemen and Buckeyes' offensive line coach Justin Frye on Monday. The topics on this episode include: Start to 3:20: Ohio State's ranking in the preseason coaches poll 3:20 to 11:18: The Buckeyes who made PFF's preseason All-Big Ten team 11:18 to 23...

It's Mark it Down Monday, and Nathan Baird, Doug Lesmerises and Stephen Means are picking the Ohio State football players they think will be first-team All-Americans this season and earn trees in Buckeye Grove. But first, they discuss check-in at the Ohio State team hotel on Sunday night and what some players wore. Then (8:59), a discussion begins about the latest Ohio State basketball recruiting...

On this Friday Buckeye Talk, it's time to talk running backs. Doug Lesmerises, Nathan Baird and Stephen Means watched a part of the second practice of Ohio State's preseason Friday and then talked to members of Ohio State's running backs room. That meant assistant coach Tony Alford and backs TreVeyon Henderson, Miyan Williams, Evan Pryor and Dallan Hayden. Covered on this episode: How much better...

On this Thursday Buckeye Talk from cleveland.com, Doug Lesmerises, Nathan Baird and Stephen Means dig into the first day of Ohio State football preseason camp. The Buckeyes practiced Thursday morning, and Doug, Nathan and Stephen were there to watch, react and then ask Ryan Day about it. Topics covered in this episode include: Who looked like the starters at every position in drills? What's the wo...

On this Wednesday Buckeye Talk, Doug Lesmerises, Stephen Means and Nathan Baird look at recruiting home runs. By their definition, those are roughly top-100 national recruits that aren't from Ohio and don't have pre-existing ties to Ohio State. These are national recruiting battles where the Buckeyes go and win, beating the best teams in the country for the best players in the country. How many ho...

Since Thursday, Ohio State football saw targets commit to Alabama and UCF, saw one member of its 2023 class decommit, and also landed the quarterback it needed for the class. Oh, and the class of 2025 is officially underway with the commitment of Jontae Gilbert. Stephen and Nathan discuss that four-day stretch and try to put it in context. Also, they look ahead to Thursday's first practice and, mo...

It's a Mark It Down Monday on Buckeye Talk, and it's getting very specific about Ohio State's opener against Notre Dame on Sept. 3. Who will start for the Buckeyes on both sides of the ball in that game? This is a way for Nathan Baird, Doug Lesmerises and Stephen Means to talk about the Ohio State position battles, as preseason camp prepares to start this week. But it also puts them on the spot fo...

On this Friday edition of Buckeye Talk, Doug Lesmerises visits with former Big Ten sportswriter Teddy Greenstein, who now is a senior editor at PointsBet, to talk about three college football topics: Betting on Ohio State and the Big Ten this season, and the future of legalized betting in Ohio The development of high school QBs and Teddy's new book, "Quarterback Dads" How the Big Ten reached this...

Ohio State football's recent string of runner-up finishes for top defensive prospects have jarred some fans' confidence in the program's recruiting efforts. Each of those decisions, though, involved an individual player considering his own unique needs and preferences. When you add them up, how much do they actually affect the team the Buckeyes will put on the field in the future. Doug, Nathan and...

Ohio State coach Ryan Day put a number on how much improvement he expects from his defense under new coordinator Jim Knowles this season. Day said the standard is a top-10 performance, and regardless of what measurement you use, that is a big jump for a defense that limped through 2021. Doug, Nathan and Stephen discussed whether that is a realistic goal for the coming season and what that sort of...

On this Tuesday Buckeye Talk, Doug Lesmerises, Nathan Baird and Stephen Means are reporting from Big Ten media days in Indianapolis. Tuesday, Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren and half the league's coaches and featured players spoke, but it was kind of the boring half. No Ohio State, no Wisconsin, no Penn State, no Michigan State. That meant the focus was on what Warren said about the future of th...

On this Mark It Down Monday edition of Buckeye Talk, Nathan Baird, Doug Lesmerises and Stephen Means are marking down their Big Ten predictions for the season and unveiling the results of the 12th annual cleveland.com preseason Big Ten poll. Thirty-six reporters from around the Big Ten voted in the poll, picking the order of finish in both the East and West Divisions, the Big Ten champion and the...

It's a Friday rapid fire Buckeye Talk to wrap up the offseason as the Big Ten prepares to host its media days next week. Doug Lesmerises and Nathan Baird take more than 15 questions from text subscribers, with topics including: Whether a national title would make Ryan Day more or less likely to stay at Ohio State long-term Recent recruiting misses and what it means for coaches like Jim Knowles, To...

It's the 11th game of the Ohio State season to be previewed here on Buckeye Talk, and Maryland football is about as interesting as it has ever been in the Big Ten. On this Thursday Buckeye Talk, Ahmed Ghafir, the founder of Insidetheblackandgold.net, joins Doug Lesmerises to talk about Maryland football, which features one of the best QBs in the Big Ten (Taulia Tagovailoa) and two of the better re...

Doug Lesmerises, Nathan Baird and Stephen Means (with the help of the Ohio State text subscribrers) created a list of the 25 Most Influential Ohio State players for 2022, and this is the fourth and final podcast discussing those players. The first pod dealt with players 25 through 17, the next with players 16 through 11, the next with players 10 through 5, and now on this Wednesday episode, it's t...

On this Tuesday Buckeye Talk from cleveland.com, Doug Lesmerises and Nathan Baird are talking desire and meatloaf. Sports Illustrated created desirability ratings for college football conference purposes last week, and Ohio State was No. 1 on the list. Doug and Nathan discuss that rating. Then in the second part of the episode, they draft a top 21 of all the Power 5 programs in the country when it...

Ohio State football enters the season as a national championship contender in most estimations. But the sports books have only set the Buckeyes' over/under win total at 10.5 as preseason approaches. Why is that, and is OSU a virtual lock at that number? We brought on Buckeye Talk's favorite betting numbers guy Tyler Shoemaker to discuss whether OSU is a smart bet. We also used this Mark It Down Mo...

On this Friday Buckeye Talk episode, it's the third installment of the top 25 Most Influential Ohio State football players for the 2022 season. Doug Lesmerises, Nathan Baird and Stephen Means previously covered players 25 through 17, and players 16 through 11, in two earlier episodes. Now it's players 10 through five, and it's heavy on young guys. Five of the six players discussed in this episode...

The preview of Ohio State opponents for the 2022 football season continues with the Indiana Hoosiers, who will visit on Ohio Stadium on Nov. 12. That will be the 10th game of the season for the Buckeyes, and it may not be very competitive. Indiana is coming off a 2021 season that started with a lot of hope and ended with a 0-9 Big Ten record. The two coordinators changed, quarterback Michael Penix...

On this Wednesday episode, Buckeye Talk is all about Buckeye Talk. No football in here. This podcast started in September 2015, and now seven years later, there have been somewhere around 1,000 episodes of Buckeye Talk. To acknowledge that, Doug Lesmerises, Nathan Baird and Stephen Means took this episode to talk all about the show and solicit feedback and comments. Are the guys too negative about...

On this Tuesday episode, Doug Lesmerises, Nathan Baird and Stephen Means continue to work their way through the most influential Ohio State football players for the 2022 season. The list of the top 25 started on the Friday pod with players 25 through 17. Now six more players are discussed, going from No. 16 to the edge of the top 10. Two players on this episode are fourth-year defensive end Zach H...

Not since Michael Jenkins in 2022 has Ohio State entered a season with such a clear-cut No. 1 choice in its receiver corps. Jaxon Smith-Njigba already has one record-setting season behind him and could be en route to another. But who will emerge as the second most productive receiver in that corps this fall? Doug, Nathan and Stephen predict the runners-up in receptions, receiving yards and touchdo...

On this Friday Buckeye Talk from cleveland.com, Doug Lesmerises, Nathan Baird and Stephen Means are back with a new project. It's the most influential Ohio State football players for this season, and on this episode, the guys explain the concept and then run through players 25 through 17 on this list of the 25 most influential Buckeyes. Doug, Nathan and Stephen each rated players in two categories...

We are up to the ninth game of the season in our Buckeye Talk preview of Ohio State's 2022 schedule, as Louie Vaccher joins Doug Lesmerises to talk about the Buckeyes' trip to Northwestern on Nov. 5. Louie covers the Wildcats for WildcatReport.com in the Rivals network, and on this episode, he joins Doug to discuss Northwestern's habit of hanging around with the Buckeyes. In their last five games...