Real Pod Wednesdays

Landmark news broke in the world of college sports this past week. USC and UCLA are coming to the Big Ten in 2024, and the move will have ripple effects for years to come. With Dan Hope on vacation this week, Garrick Hodge joined Griffin Strom to break down how the Big Ten’s latest expansion efforts will impact Ohio State and college athletics as a whole. We started by stating our initial reaction...

It’s been a huge week for Ohio State in recruiting – specifically, for wide receiver recruiting. Ohio State landed commitments from five-star wide receivers on back-to-back days when Carnell Tate and Brandon Inniss committed to the Buckeyes on Monday and Tuesday. To help us put it all into context and explain how the Buckeyes pulled it off, Eleven Warriors recruiting analyst Garrick Hodge joins us...

More than 1,000 high school football players have made their way through the Woody Hayes Athletic Center over the past week for Ohio State’s first three high school football camps of the year, and we’ve been there to watch all the action unfold. For the first half of this week’s episode of Real Pod Wednesdays, we share what we’ve learned from attending those three camps, including a list of the mo...

Ohio State’s biggest recruiting month of the summer has begun. The first of seven camps for high school football players is taking place on Wednesday at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center. Over the next 21 days, Ohio State will host thousands of high school football prospects hoping to earn an offer from the Buckeyes or at minimum, get some valuable coaching from members of OSU’s coaching staff. Ohio...

Day is now one of the five highest-paid coaches in college football after receiving a two-year contract extension through the 2028 season that upped his compensation to $9.5 million per year. Holtmann received a pay bump to $3.5 million while his contract was extended through the 2027-28 season. Why was now the time to give both of them extensions, considering Ohio State football did not achieve i...

We now know exactly when Ohio State’s 2022 season will kick off, and it's hard not to start getting excited. Ohio State’s Sept. 3 season opener against Notre Dame is still more than three months away, but the buildup to the Buckeyes’ first game of the year received a big jolt of energy Tuesday when ESPN announced that the highly anticipated non-conference clash at Ohio Stadium will be played under...

We couldn’t have picked a better week for Garrick Hodge to co-host Real Pod Wednesdays. With regular co-host Griffin Strom vacationing in Costa Rica, Eleven Warriors recruiting writer Garrick Hodge took his place on this week’s episode of RPW, and the timing worked out perfectly as it gave us the opportunity to talk about Ohio State’s biggest commitment of the year to date. Of course, we’re talkin...

Ohio State’s 2022 NFL draft class was smaller than usual, but the Buckeyes should have a larger draft class in 2023. Those two topics get most of our attention on this week’s episode of Real Pod Wednesdays, just a few days after Ohio State had six players selected in the 2022 NFL draft.  This year’s NFL draft was a mixture of good and bad for the Buckeyes, as there were plenty of moments worth cel...

It’s time to make our predictions for where each Buckeye will land in the 2022 NFL draft. On this week’s episode of Real Pod Wednesdays, we preview the NFL draft by making predictions for which teams we think Chris Olave and Garrett Wilson will land with on Thursday night, what rounds we think Nicholas Petit-Frere, Jeremy Ruckert, Thayer Munford, Haskell Garrett and Tyreke Smith will be selected i...

The final week of spring football gave us our closest look yet at the 2022 Buckeyes. Ohio State took the field on Saturday for its annual spring game in Ohio Stadium, and while there wasn’t necessarily any overarching storyline that came out of this year’s scrimmage, there were no shortage of individual players who stood out. We begin this week’s episode of Real Pod Wednesdays by talking about som...

While we’re looking forward to this weekend’s spring game at Ohio Stadium, we had to start this week’s episode of Real Pod Wednesdays by looking back. Following this weekend’s tragic death of Dwayne Haskins , we took some time at the beginning of this week’s show to reflect on the impact Haskins made on Ohio State and remember some of his most memorable performances as a Buckeye, including Ohio St...

You often ask us who’s standing out and making a move up the depth chart at spring practice, and now, we feel equipped to actually answer those questions. Saturday’s Student Appreciation Day gave us our first opportunity of the spring to watch the Buckeyes practice actual football – as in, we got to watch team drills, 7-on-7 drills and head-to-head competition rather than just warmups and individu...

A national championship-winning coach joins us on this week’s episode of Real Pod Wednesdays. Just over one week after she led Ohio State women’s hockey to its first national title in program history, Nadine Muzerall joins us on RPW to talk about the Buckeyes’ journey to making history. In a 20-minute interview with the Buckeyes’ head coach, Muzerall tells us what makes winning a national champion...

While the college basketball season still has two more weeks to go, Ohio State’s men’s basketball season is over. Ohio State’s 2021-22 season came to an end on Sunday, when the Buckeyes lost to Villanova in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. Although the loss to Villanova wasn’t particularly surprising, it still made for an unsatisfying ending to the season as Ohio State has now gone nine ye...

Ohio State will play its first game of the NCAA Tournament at 12:15 p.m. Friday in Pittsburgh, where the seventh-seeded Buckeyes will face No. 10 seed Loyola in a matchup that has many calling for a first-round upset. Will the Buckeyes’ late-season skid continue with a first-round NCAA Tournament loss for the second straight year, or will they make the most of their talent advantage against the Ra...

The Ohio State football team is back on the practice field, the NFL Scouting Combine is complete and the postseason is about to begin for Ohio State men’s basketball. Tuesday was the first day of spring football at Ohio State, and that’s where we begin on this week’s episode of Real Pod Wednesdays, on which we share our takeaways from watching the first 30 minutes of the Buckeyes’ opening practice...

This is March, which means there’s plenty happening in the world of Ohio State sports. The Ohio State football team is expected to begin spring practices next week, so we start this week’s episode – after Griffin recounts his near-death experience during his trip to Champaign for last week’s basketball game at Illinois – by looking ahead to the start of spring ball and discussing who and what we’l...

Gene Smith’s press conference at Ohio State last week provided plenty of fodder for this week’s episode of Real Pod Wednesdays. Of course, we had to start by talking about the news that got everyone talking: Smith saying he does not think Ohio State should host a College Football Playoff game at Ohio Stadium. Would it really make sense for the Buckeyes to give up home-field advantage in the CFP to...

Should Ohio State really be a 17-point favorite over Georgia? That’s a question we ask on this week’s episode of Real Pod Wednesdays after early bowl projections released by The Action Network earlier this week listed Ohio State as a 17-point favorite for a hypothetical College Football Playoff semifinal game over Georgia, as well as a 2-point favorite in a hypothetical national championship game...

Ohio State’s early enrollees met the media last week, there’s been lots of coaching staff drama in Ann Arbor and Joe Burrow is about to play in the Super Bowl. We discuss all of those topics on this week’s episode of Real Pod Wednesdays – but first, we share our thoughts on the new turf at Ohio Stadium and our favorite fan-submitted designs. After projecting which players would be the stars of the...

Ohio State is wrapping up its recruiting class of 2022 today, and we finally got to meet the Buckeyes’ new assistant coaches this week. We start this week’s episode of Real Pod Wednesdays by sharing our overall thoughts on the Buckeyes’ recruiting class of 2022 and making our picks for which players we expect to make the biggest immediate impact from the class, who we expect to be the biggest star...

This week’s episode of Real Pod Wednesdays is all about Ohio State’s 2022 depth chart. After Dan published his initial projection of Ohio State’s 2022 depth chart on Eleven Warriors  on Wednesday morning, the guys spend an hour analyzing the potential depth chart position-by-position. How will this year’s wide receiver rotation look following the departures of Chris Olave and Garrett Wilson? Who w...

Ohio State continued to overhaul its defensive coaching staff, the Buckeyes got good news at the NFL draft entry deadline and Ohio State has a new schedule for the 2022 season. All of that made for a newsy week since our last episode of Real Pod Wednesdays, and we dive into all three of those topics as Griffin returns to the show this week. First up, we take a closer look at Ohio State’s new hires...

You’ll hear two different voices on this week’s episode of Real Pod Wednesdays. With Griffin Strom feeling under the weather, Kevin Harrish joins Dan Hope for the first half of this week’s episode while Garrick Hodge joins Dan for the second half of the show as we talk about all of the latest developments in Ohio State football. Kevin and Dan start by sharing some Ohio State-themed takeaways from...

Ohio State’s 2021 football season ended in dramatic fashion. After spending a week in Southern California, where we watched Ohio State beat Utah 48-45 in what we both agreed was one of the wildest games we’ve ever covered, we have plenty to discuss from the Rose Bowl on this week’s episode of Real Pod Wednesdays. Of course, we had to start by talking about Jaxon Smith-Njigba and C.J. Stroud, as we...