Buckeye Talk: Ohio State podcast by cleveland.com

In May 2021, few if any expected Jaxon Smith-Njigba to have Ohio State football’s most prolific receiving season. As late as June 28, no one would put their name on a potential Buckeye loss to Oregon on Sept. 11. Yet by Aug. 16, in the middle of preseason camp, major questions were beginning to leak through about a potential lack of playmakers on the OSU defense. Sometimes even when the Buckeye Ta...

On this Tuesday episode of Buckeye Talk, Doug Lesmerises, Nathan Baird and Stephen Means offer a shorter version of their typical rapid fire pod, taking nine questions from text subscribers over the course of an hour. And they are all directly about Ohio State football. No conference realignment talk for the moment. How long will Jim Knowles remain Ohio State's defensive coordinator? How important...

On this Monday Buckeye Talk celebrating the Fourth of July, Doug Lesmerises, Nathan Baird and Stephen Means are here with a draft. This is based off the idea that 15 years ago, both Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman and Ohio State receivers coach Brian Hartline were Ohio State football players. So now, let's took 15 years into the future, and imagine which people associated with the Buckeyes co...

On this Buckeye Talk, Doug Lesmerises and Nathan Baird report back from Friday morning's news conference with Kristina Johnson and Gene Smith on the Ohio State view of Big Ten expansion. They discuss the future; why revenue sharing in the Big Ten will remain equal; Smith's brief, frustrated dalliance with Ohio State going independent; what text subscribers said about USC and UCLA in a survey; and...

Doug Lesmerises, Nathan Baird and Stephen Means are back together for the big breaking news of the Big Ten preparing to add USC and UCLA. As discussed on this episode ... "Whaatttt?" The guys dive in on this Thursday Buckeye Talk. as college football continues to change. Thanks for listening. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michigan is coming off its first win over the Ohio State football program in over a decade allowing the Wolverines to win the Big Ten Championship and make their College Football Playoff debut. It would be understandable to think that the program could build on that with a fruitful summer on the recruiting trail helping close the gap between them and the Buckeyes some. Instead the opposite has hap...

Commitment season is upon us for Ohio State and the rest of college football. Stephen Means is joined by the return of Nathan Baird from baby duty as the two project the Buckeyes’ 2023 recruiting class answering these important questions. • How many 5-stars and top 100 recruits will the class have? • Will Kayin Lee be the only commitment of the week? • What’s going on with five-star Caleb Downs? •...

We're up to Game 8 of the Ohio State season on our Buckeye Talk game previews for 2022. On this episode, Doug Lesmerises talks to Bob Flounders of Pennlive.com about Ohio State's trip to Penn State on Oct. 29. What's the state of Penn State football and should the Nittany Lions be prepping soon for their own playoff season after watching Michigan last year? How will Penn State plan to keep up with...

On this BuckeyeFly Effect, Doug Lesmerises, Nathan Baird and Stephen Means consider an intriguing What If. What if quarterback C.J. Stroud didn't pick Ohio State late in the recruiting process in the Class of 2020? Where might Stroud have gone? What would Stroud's career look like right now? What effect would that have had on OSU QBs Kyle McCord, Jack Miller, Quinn Ewers and others? Would the Buck...

On this Wednesday Buckeye Talk from cleveland.com, Doug Lesmerises and Stephen Means are taking questions from text subscribers. Among them: Is Marcus Freeman or Brian Hartline the more likely candidate to be Ohio State's next head coach? Is this a make-or break-year for the Buckeyes in terms of their national status? Is Emeka Egbuka or Julian Fleming more underrated entering this season? Would we...

On this Tuesday Buckeye Talk, Stephen Means and Doug Lesmerises talk about the latest five-star pledge to the Buckeyes. Ohio State landed a verbal commitment from receiver Carnell Tate on Monday, and he became the highest-rated player in Ohio State's 2023 recruiting class. The 6-foot-2, 185-pound receiver is ranked as the No. 3 receiver and No. 28 overall player in the 247sports composite ratings....

On this Monday episode of Buckeye Talk, Doug Lesmerises is joined by John Steppe of the Cedar Rapids Gazette and thegazette,com to preview Ohio State's seventh game of the 2022 football season -- against Iowa in Ohio Stadium on Oct. 22, with the Buckeyes coming off a bye. Ohio State hasn't beaten Iowa since 2013, primarily because the teams have played just once since then, and the Hawkeyes upset...

Oh yeah, Buckeye Talk is really going back to 1930. On this Friday episode, it’s the first Buckeye ReTalkable in some time, as Buckeye Talk on occasion likes to rewatch and relive Ohio State football games of the past. But a game has never been this old before. Doug Lesmerises and Nathan Baird on this episode break down the 1930 Ohio State-Michigan game, which was played in mid-October in Columbus...

On this Thursday Buckeye Talk from cleveland.com, Stephen Means is back to talk with Doug Lesmerises, giving another recruiting report after watching two days of camps at Ohio State on Tuesday and Wednesday. Among the topics: Two young in-state QBs set to make an appearance in Columbus this week A 2025 running back who worked out with Tony Alford The latest on the search for offensive tackle recru...

On this Wednesday Buckeye Talk, Doug Lesmerises and Stephen Means are drafting. The draftees? The 10 most important Ohio State football recruits since Urban Meyer arrived in 2012. How good the player was for the Buckeyes, and how much he helped Ohio State win, does matter. But so does what the player represents, and whether he established something at Ohio State that led to more recruits following...

Ohio State's first road game of the 2022 football season won't come until Week 6 when the Buckeyes visit the Michigan State Spartans in East Lansing. On this Buckeye Talk, Doug Lesmerises is joined by Matt Wenzel of MLive.com to discuss what could be a top-10 matchup, just like it was last season when the Spartans came to Ohio Stadium in late November. Is Mel Tucker, making nearly $10 million a ye...

Doug Lesmerises could not be more excited for this totally off-topic Buckeye Talk on this Monday. He welcomes The Wolf of Franchises, who runs a website, podcast and Twitter account dedicated to how franchises work, and that means writing and talking a lot about fast food businesses like Cane's, Chick-fil-A and Wendy's. On this episode, Doug and Wolf discuss what kind of money the best franchises...

It's time for another BuckeyeFly Effect on Buckeye Talk, where the past is reconsidered. On this episode, Doug Lesmerises and Nathan Baird (this was recorded before Nathan's paternity leave) look at the ramifications of Michigan's victory over Ohio State last season. What if the Buckeyes had won instead? Would Ohio State have gone on to win the national title? Would C.J. Stroud have won the Heisma...

On this Thursday Buckeye Talk, Doug Lesmerises and Stephen Means go back to their text subscribers to answer more questions about Ohio State's recruiting. Among the specific players from the Class of 2023 who are discussed: WR Carnell Tate, WR Brandon Inniss, S Caleb Downs, RB Justice Haynes, OT Samson Okunlola, OT Olaus Alinen, CB Daniel Harris, S Joenel Aguero, LB Tackett Curtis, LB Arvell Reese...

On this Wednesday episode from cleveland.com, Stephen Means brings his knowledge from watching two days of Ohio State recruiting camps on Monday and Tuesday to Buckeye Talk and discusses it with Doug Lesmerises. What receivers did Brian Hartline get fired up about and have to offer? What is Ohio State's 2023 quarterback recruiting strategy with another offer made to a QB this week? How did the fut...

It's time for Week 5 as Buckeye Talk continues to devote an episode to each game of Ohio State's 2022 football schedule. On Oct. 1, the Buckeyes will host Rutgers for homecoming with a 3:30 kickoff, and on this Buckeye Talk, Steve Politi of nj.com is here to talk about that. But there's only some Rutgers talk, including about quarterback Gavin Wimsatt, who is Rutgers' version of Quinn Ewers. He re...

On this Monday Buckeye Talk that is dropping early over the weekend, Doug Lesmerises and Stephen Means take a bunch of questions from Ohio State text subscribers, many of them centered around Ryan Day saying the Buckeyes need $13 million in NIL money available to them to keep their football roster together. There's a lot of information shared there, but there are also discussions of: Doug's potent...

On this Friday Buckeye Talk, you may not believe it, but Doug Lesmerises is buying the Wisconsin Badgers this season. Sophomore running back Braelon Allen could be a superstar. Badgers defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard has proven he's one of the best in the business. And what if Wisconsin quarterback Graham Mertz, a former big-time recruit, is good? On this latest opponent preview episode, Doug g...

On this Thursday Buckeye Talk, Stephen Means is back and he joins Doug Lesmerises to discuss the recruiting camp they attended at Ohio State on Wednesday. What two 2023 quarterback prospects were there and who earned an offer? What other players earned OSU scholarship offers, including one who had current Buckeyes shouting support? Who was the player not yet in high school that came from Georgia t...

This Wednesday Buckeye Talk gets into the numbers of recruiting, as Doug Lesmerises is joined by Bud Davis, who has his PhD in Geology, but who also happens to find the data of college football recruiting rather interesting. Doug saw some of Bud's work on official recruiting visits on Twitter and invited him on the pod to get deeper into the topic. How important is it for a school to be the last o...