It is hard to miss inside the Woody Hayes Athletic Center. The schedule is on the wall, and the team sees it every day.
Six of Ohio State’s 12 regular-season opponents are ranked in the AP Poll. Three of them sit in the top six: No. 2 Oregon, No. 5 Texas and No. 6 Indiana.
“There’s a board right over there that has them all on there,” starting center Carson Hinzman said Tuesday, pointing to the schedule in the team meeting room. “So obviously you see it every time you come in the room and stuff like that. We have it all in our rooms. There’s a lot of big games on there. We got to go and win. So I wouldn’t say it’s not talked about at all. I mean, it’s obviously a thing we got to do, but we also got to take this one game at a time, and right now it’s Ball State.”
Right now, it is Ball State. The 2026 season starts Saturday when the Cardinals come to Columbus for a 12:30 p.m. kickoff at Ohio Stadium on the Big Ten Network.
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The program goals have not changed. Beat Michigan. Win the Big Ten. Win a national title. Those are the targets outlined year after year inside the Woody Hayes Athletic Center.
Ask players about personal goals and most of them start with those team goals before they talk about themselves. That is true for players who have been Buckeyes for years and for players who arrived in the last transfer portal window.
That culture is what makes the chemistry hold. Fresh faces get brought in faster because the standard is already set.
Defensive tackle John Walker transferred from UCF this off-season. Ohio State recruited him hard out of high school, and he said the message has not changed.
“Nothing’s surprising me, because I’ve been here since I got up (to Columbus) from high school, so I already knew everything they had pretty much thrown at me,” Walker said in mid-August. “So when I came up here (when I was in the transfer portal), it was pretty much like a revisit from high school. Everything was good with the coaches and everything.”
As Walker put it, he did not need to drink the Kool-Aid. He has “been drinking the Kool-Aid.”
At the center of that is Ryan Day. He has bought into Ohio State and Columbus since he arrived, and that buy-in has only grown. It is also what he needs for a new-look roster in a new era of college football, where portal additions have to feel like Buckeyes quickly if the team is going to survive a schedule that starts with Ball State and gets much harder after that.
Today is the first test of whether that culture shows up on the field.
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