It is still 75 days until the start of the Ohio State season, barring any sort of decision to delay or cancel the season, but nobody wants to even speak those awful outcomes into existence.

So far at the WHAC, things have reportedly been going smoothly as Ohio State players have been going through voluntary workouts for now and a recently passed "return to play" plan would allow teams that start in week one to make those workouts "required" on July 13th and then follow that up with an "enhanced training schedule" on July 24th and then fall practice starting on August 7th, all as part of the ramp-up to get teams back up-to-speed after so much missed time.

But as more and more teams return and undergo testing, and numbers of asymptomatic players are on the rise, could we be working ourselves up for a big letdown?

In this week's edition of the 3-2-1 brought to you by our friends at Hague Water Conditioning, we talk a little bit more about this as everyone is ready for the return of football. Plus, we look years in the future at an upcoming series for the Ohio State football team that nobody on the current roster or even in the current recruiting classes would actually be a part of, at least as a player. And while we leave much of the recruiting talk for the Thursday Edition of the 3-2-1, have the Buckeyes lost some momentum on the recruiting trail or was this just to be expected after such a hot start and no visits?

1 - Not everyone is having the same return to workout experience

30 players at LSU, more than 20 at Clemson, a dozen or so players at Texas, Kansas State is pausing its voluntary workouts, what exactly is going on around here?

As programs are bringing their athletes back into the fold and testing them on the way in the door, concerning numbers are being released about a few to many players at many schools testing positive for COVID-19, even if it appears that many of these players have been walking around asymptomatic and unaware that anything was going on.

That does not change the fact that it requires all of these players to have to go into isolation and anyone who came into close contact as well.

But let's be real here, anyone who was expecting nobody to come up and test positive in this process was either kidding themselves or just not paying attention. In short, it was going to happen.

Ohio State has not published any sort of numbers but word from around the WHAC has been very positive in terms of the health of the team, even if nobody is going to speak truly on or off-the-record about these matters.

Dr. Anthony Fauci came out last week casting doubt on football being played on either a professional or collegiate level, something that sports fans either scoffed immediately or went into a deep depression, but that is the opinion of one expert and as we have seen throughout this entire process, there is no consensus on how things need to be handled on something that seems to change almost by the day.

We don't know if we are talking about any players who are showing symptoms or if this is just a case of someone having the antibodies in their system and who could have come into contact months ago and with no ill-effects, never found reason to be tested up until a return of campus forced a test.

Since we are asking this in the "what we learned" portion of the piece, we won't pose a bunch of questions in this section. The fact is that there seems to be a pretty wide range of results from school-to-school on how things are going but we also do not know all the parameters around each of the testing groups. Plus, we don't know how many schools that are not on the list of schools with numbers actually have numbers and just are not reporting them, either in a very conservative interpretation of the HIPAA regulations or just something else driving them not to put numbers out there.

With the next important date in the return to play plan still more than three weeks away, getting players through any sort of two-week quarantine now is important, because as we stated earlier, there really was no chance that schools were going to see student-athletes coming back from all points around the country and not have some positive tests.

The question will be (and we hate asking questions here) is will anyone actually show symptoms? The reality of the reported numbers from across the nation is that people under the age of 25 are hardly moved by this virus. But what does this mean for a school that has no reported cases or anyone with the antibodies? Would it be better to "get this out of the way" without recklessly exposing young men and women to the virus?

So many questions and so few answers. That seems to be par for the course here in 2020.

2 - Some delays are good news

With the splitting of the 3-2-1 sections, we have tried to stay out of the recruiting news as much as possible, but sometimes timing requires us to talk about it, and let's be honest, there is just a lot of the same going on from week-to-week and we need a little diversity here of what to talk about.

The whole "dead period" put into place by the NCAA certainly did not help Ohio State's cause when it came to a player like JC Latham, not getting the talented offensive lineman on campus and ultimately seeing him commit to Alabama.

Ohio State on the other side probably benefitted with a player like Tunmise Adeleye, where with an uncertain future as to when campuses would open up, the talented defensive lineman just pulled the trigger on the team he had been favoring all along.

What about with someone like Jager Burton, who is now pushing away from a late August decision date in order to take his official visits.

Our Dave Lackford feels that it certainly helps Ohio State as well as Alabama and probably hurts the in-state school of Kentucky, which seemed to be the school with a lot of momentum on this one.

Earlier this month, Lackford sat down for an extensive one-on-one with Burton, when he was still looking at that August decision date and Burton did discuss the talk of everyone feeling at the time that he was a strong Ohio State lean.

It certainly would help the cause for the Buckeyes to get Burton back on campus for the official visit, the whole treatment, come fall and once the NCAA decides to open things back up.

Granted, we don't know what a football Saturday will look like. Will the stadium be 20-percent full, 50-percent full, just the football team? One of the major selling points of Ohio State is a stadium of more than 100-thousand screaming fans, TBDBITL performing Script Ohio and just everything that sets Ohio Stadium in a rare air when it comes to football venues.

If Burton was going to decide without these official visits, Ohio State would have had a lot of work to do without being able to see Burton in-person. Now with the constraints of the calendar somewhat off the table, it is game on.

3 - Ohio State is not afraid to schedule the big games

As we learned this past week the Buckeyes have set up a home-and-home with Alabama but you are not going to see this series any time soon with the games not taking place until 2027 and 2028, mark your calendars now.

Many programs are just finding their way to scheduling high-major opponents now but the Buckeyes have been doing this for some time now. People were quick to point out how Ohio State did not have a Power Five opponent in 2019 but are quick to omit that a scheduled home-and-home series with TCU was turned into a one-game deal in Dallas and left the Buckeyes looking for an opponent in what was supposed to be the return year.

Ohio State had five road league games of its nine-game league schedule and really could not even look at taking a prestigious one-game neutral site opponent, even if one was made available with only six home games locked in (four league, two non-conference).

Leading into that TCU series the Buckeyes have had series with Texas, USC, Oklahoma, Washington, Virginia Tech and others as Ohio State has tried to maintain a schedule where it plays one top Power Five game, a mid-major home game and then an in-state or highly regional game to round out the schedule.

Things will not be changing any time soon, and honestly things could be a little tougher in a year like 2025 where Ohio State has a series starting at Texas and a series ending against Washington both falling in the same season. Add series with Notre Dame, UGA and now Alabama and Ohio State has at least one top-team on the schedule for every year outside of 2029.

And don't expect the Buckeyes to shy away from anyone. Who's going to answer the call in 2029?

1 - Has recruiting lost momentum or is it something else?

We will be quick on this one.

Ohio State at one point appeared to be unstoppable on the recruiting trail, just selecting players more so than recruiting them.

Now it has been almost a month since a player has committed to the class of 2021, since Denzel Burke committed in late-May and Ohio State only had two commits in the entire month of May, none in June.

The Buckeyes are sitting with 19 commits at this point, it is not as if there is an unlimited number of spots available for Ohio State to keep adding six or seven players a month, there is a limit to all of this.

And Ohio State recruiting fans are lamenting missing out on a couple of big names as of late and maybe hearing some news that does not exactly mesh with the best-case scenario class that everyone was dreaming of.

Has the dead period finally caught up with the Buckeyes? We talked about it a little earlier and how the delay of Jager Burton is certainly not a bad thing.

But also remember that Ohio State is in on some huge names that don't appear to be in any hurry at this time. Neither of the players from the state of Washington appear to be in a tremendous hurry to make a call, and the same could be said about several other top names out there.

CJ. Stroud, Enokk Vimahi, Nick Petit-Frere, Chris Olave were all names to come on board late for the Buckeyes in previous recruiting cycles. They were not names that were seriously on the board in June of their respective cycles.

Don't look at this as a loss of momentum for recruiting, but just a matter of the numbers finally catching up a little bit. If Ohio State was sitting at 24 commits in July, what would we have to talk about come October when it came to recruiting anyways?

2 - Will the recently passed 'return to play' schedule stay intact?

We talked about this one earlier in the piece as well but will pose the simple question, will the return to play calendar that was only approved by the Division I council look the same now that all of these positive tests are coming in?

Voluntary workouts are just that, voluntary, at least in name. If you are able and ready to workout and don't show up for these, that probably does not bode well for your push for playing time and honestly, we can't imagine many, if any, players across the nation taking a, "Nah, I am good" approach to these.

But with players just going into two-week quarantines now, ahead of the ramping up of dates, could we see an adjustment to the start of any of the dates? The toughest dates to move would be the ones for the games of the season, especially with the desire to try and get as much of this done before the weather truly turns cold.

It is also doubtful that the start of "fall camp" could really move back. But the dates before that where coaches are able to start the eight-hour weeks with teams, leading into the 20-hour weeks could be more flexible.

So much of this will be dictated by what testing numbers look like in two weeks, compared to what they look like now.

BTN is starting to roll out its basketball teams this week and football will not start until the week of the 29th, but expect there to be a lot of Ohio State players over the course of that week.

Ohio State has only lost 18 games between 2010 and 2019, and seven of those games were during that 2011 transitional season. Ohio State won at least 11 games in all but one of those seasons (again, 2011) and helped stock the NFL with talent.

The bigger prediction here is that Ohio State fans will not be happy with these teams when some obvious choices for first-team get shuffled down. It is Big Ten Network, not Ohio State Network and while we are not saying they are going to cook the books, some ties may go to other teams in order to make this a more palatable list for the entire conference, especially as many fans already feel that Ohio State is on the network entirely too much.

Next week we may predict a few players that we expect to see on the team, provided there is not an onslaught of breaking news to push it off the page.