Ohio State opened its season by beating Ball State 56-3, and the most telling thing that happened all afternoon came after the final whistle: Ryan Day was already talking about Texas. He called the trip to Austin a monster game. He is not wrong, and he did not bother pretending otherwise, which is its own small piece of honesty from a coach who usually keeps the next opponent in a locked drawer.
That is the real story of Ohio State vs Texas beginning to take shape. Openers against overmatched opponents tell you almost nothing except whether the machine starts. This one started.
What happened in Ohio State's 56-3 win over Ball State
Fifty-six to three. There is not a lot of nuance to mine out of a number like that, and anybody who tells you they learned something profound about the top-ranked team in the country from it is selling something. Ball State walked into the Horseshoe against a roster built for January and got treated accordingly.
What matters is what did not happen. No slow start that turned into a second-quarter emergency. No third-string drama. The Buckeyes handled their business early enough that the coach's mind was free to wander east and south to Texas well before the stadium emptied.
I have watched a lot of top-ranked teams sleepwalk through week one and then spend six days answering questions about why. Day skipped that entire genre of press conference. Efficient.
Why Ohio State vs Texas is the game that actually matters
Because it is the rare non-conference heavyweight bout that both programs actually wanted, in a sport where those get scheduled a decade out and then everybody spends the intervening years hoping the other guy is down. Neither one is down.
And Texas has Arch Manning, who was busy on Saturday himself, connecting on a 20-yard touchdown pass to Cam Coleman in a clip that made the rounds about two minutes after Day started talking about the Longhorns. The timing was almost too neat. Two teams, two states, one shared calendar square that everybody in college football has circled.
The Buckeyes will go into Austin as the ranked team with the resume. That has historically meant less than people think in a road environment like that one, which is exactly why Day is not waiting to start thinking about it.
The Tressel note, because the day had a nice rhyme to it
Ohio State also enshrined Jim Tressel into its ring of honor on Saturday, which is the kind of thing that can feel like ceremony filler until you remember what he actually built there.
checked the almanac: tressel's 2002 team went 14-0 and beat miami in double overtime at the fiesta bowl to end the hurricanes' 34-game winning streak. that is still one of the great upsets in the sport's modern history, and it happened because a team nobody picked showed up and played the whole sixty minutes plus change.
Honoring that on the same day the current Buckeyes hung 56 on somebody and then immediately started grinding on a road giant is about as on-brand as Columbus gets.
What I'm watching next
Three things, in order. First, how healthy Ohio State comes out of a game they controlled from the jump, because blowouts are where you either rest people or lose them to nothing. Second, whether Day keeps the messaging this open or clamps down once the week gets real. Third, and most of all, Manning against that defense.
I do not need to see another opener. I need to see the Buckeyes in a loud building with a real quarterback across from them. That is the game. Everything before it was a warmup, and Ryan Day said so out loud before anybody asked him to.