Ohio State welcomes Grambling State and it’s storied and proud tradition to the Horseshoe on Saturday afternoon. Lots of Buckeyes will play. The keys for Ryan Day won’t be the halftime shows, but improvement, quality feedback and playing to the standard.
Grambling State coach Mickey Joseph tried to keep a straight face. But he couldn’t.
The reporter’s question: “Your initial thoughts on the defending champs?”
Joseph was ready with wit and a smile.
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“Well, first of all, they got a great band, and we have a great band. And we’re gonna compete as a band.”
Joseph knows what the result will be when his Tigers enter the Horseshoe for a 3:30 appointment with Ohio State on Saturday. Ohio State paid Grambling $1 million to ensure their appearance, compensate them for travel and play the first of two tune-up games before the Big Ten schedule begins.
Jokes aside.
“We understand what we’re getting into,” Joseph said with the straight face of someone who knows the sobering fate that awaits. “We understand what’s gonna happen. We understand there’s not balance in the scholarships, not balance in what they have resources wise and what we have resources wise. We all know why we’re playing the game.”
This is not Eddie Robinson’s Grambling. The Tigers finished 5-7 last year and haven’t had a winning season since going 6-5 in 2019. In 56 seasons (the last being 1997), Robinson won 408 games with a winning percentage of .707. He retired as the winningest Division I coach. Joe Paterno surpassed him in 2011 by one game. The Football Writers Association of America’s annual coach of the year award bears Robinson’s name.
“They got a great band. And we have a great band. We’re going to compete as a band.” – Grambling coach Mickey Joseph
Robinson sent over 200 players to the NFL. Willie Davis, Willie Brown, Buck Buchanan and Charlie Joiner made it to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Doug Williams quarterbacked the Washington Redskins to a Super Bowl victory. That’s quite a number of Hall of Famers considering a program the size and scope of Ohio State has nine alumni inducted as players.
Ryan Day wanted his players to know what the program they are playing Saturday represents. So he asked defensive line coach Larry Johnson to share an Eddie Robinson story.
“[He] talked about his experience of listening to Coach Robinson at a clinic, and after that he realized that he wanted to coach,” Day said of Johnson. “He and I spoke before practice, and we thought it was good for our guys to understand that Coach Robinson and Grambling are a big brick in what is college football now. We talk a lot about tradition at Ohio State, and Grambling has great tradition as well.”
The history for the HBCU school from Grambling, Louisiana, is glorious. But this won’t turn out like Appalachian State and Michigan did in 2007 on the darkest of days in Ann Arbor.
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Joseph in his second season at Grambling, but he knows college football at its highest level. He served as an associate head coach at Nebraska, his alma mater, in 2022 and completed that season as interim head coach. He was the receivers coach at LSU in 2019 when Joe Burrow led the Tigers to the national championship. He was Nebraska’s starting quarterback in 1990 when the Cornhuskers finished 9-3.
His goal Saturday is not unlike Day’s goal for the Buckeyes.
“I spoke to the coaches today and said the game better be clean,” Joseph said. “Clean to me is that we don’t have nine people on the field, we don’t have 13 people on the field. It’s clean. Play within the system, and we swing.”
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Day will demand a clean game, the same focus his team gave Texas, and great effort. If the starters do those things well, then the second- and third-teamers will get valuable reps, reps that help them improve and reps that help coaches evaluate under game conditions.
Expect backup quarterback Lincoln Kienholz to play more than just the final possession. If the score goes like it should, Day didn’t rule out true freshman Tavien St. Clair from getting his first college reps.
But for the ideal to happen, the Buckeyes can’t start slow or lack focus. They have to ignore the Grambling “G” on the helmets.
Day admitted it’s coach speak to say it’s always about us, not the opponent. He will find out this week how much this team, full of new starters, handles that admonition following the confidence boost of beating the No. 1-ranked team.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do, a ton,” Day said. “After you come down from the emotion of the game, you get back on the film and you get to work, you just realize that there’s so many things that we’ve got to improve on. That’s what the focus is going to be regardless of the opponent.”
Last year’s group of 22 entered the season with almost 700 combined starts and understood the necessity of playing to a standard, not an opponent.
“When you have a bunch of guys coming in who don’t have that same experience, it’s different,” Day said. “Coming out of that game they realize they can play with anybody in the country. That being said, it is a long season. There’s so many corrections that need to be made. There’s a lot of improvements that have to happen in all three phases.”
Grambling is light years from being like the Buckeyes’ last seven opponents. Last week’s 14-7 win over Texas concluded a historic championship run. Those four victories came on the heels of finishing the season against Indiana and Michigan. And since November 2 in Happy Valley, the Buckeyes have defeated six teams ranked in the top five – Penn State, Indiana, Oregon, Texas, Notre Dame and Texas again.
A letdown of some degree – even if it’s only perceptible to the coaches – is probable.
The Buckeyes know they don’t have to be on upset alert, but they will get Grambling’s best shot. It won’t be enough to pull the upset. But it will be enough to see if the Buckeyes are serious about meeting the 2024 standard.
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