A Day in the Life of a Slob

Pat Elflein: Pickerington (Ohio) native, Buckeye football player, Ohio State student, friend, son, boyfriend, normal human being. Most people know the first group of those, but the “normal human” part is still a trip and easy to forget for an unfortunate number of football fans.

Elflein has been recognized throughout as the season as one of the top offensive linemen on Ohio State’s 11-1 team and has been a key cog in both this past season and the 2014 title run. The right guard has been named first team All-Big Ten for two consecutive seasons and has the potential to be selected high in the NFL Draft this offseason if he chooses to leave Columbus, but football is far from the only thing in his life. He’s built close relationships off of the field with many teammates and people in the Columbus community that he grew up in.

When the 6-foot-3, 300-pound offensive guard isn’t “salmoning” Ezekiel Elliott or talking about ‘crete with roommate and left tackle Taylor Decker, he’s fulfilling all of the responsibilities that come with his day-to-day life. Elflein is a man who has to wear many hats to get through his schedule and you get a sense of that when you hear him talk about his day.

“Alright, I’ll tell you about Thursdays, they’re my favorite days,” Elflein said with an eager grin. “So we have an offensive line weightlift at 6 AM on Thursdays, all five starters come in and we life. We’ll get done and go upstairs to the lounge and eat some breakfast. After that, we’ll go back to the house. I’ll do a little homework, maybe take a nap. I have my first class at 12:40, so I have a nice little break in there. My class schedule was nice this semester.”

A “nice” class schedule includes a handful of online classes that allowed him to lighten the workload a little bit and add more flexibility and free time to his academic schedule. Although, those online aren’t all fun and games as evidenced by the fact that one online examination at the end of the Ohio State semester (it just wrapped up on December 17th) took Elflein three hours at his computer to complete. Still, every little bit helps.

“So I go to class, then go to the Woody [Hayes Athletic Center] and eat lunch after that, then practice,” Elflein said. “After practice, we have a nice catered meal on Thursdays because it’s family deal. We decide as an offensive line if we want to go upstairs and eat or do we want to go to Rooster’s? Depending on what is we either go upstairs and eat or go and eat some chicken wings and hang out.”

Once the football obligations of his day are done, Elflein naturally follows it up with more football. Unlike his work day however, he partakes in pigskin on the television during his evenings, not on the turf. After the even more grueling schedules of his time as an underclassmen, the fourth-year student has learned not to take free time for granted.

“After that, you head home, catch some Thursday night football, and call it a night. We wake up at like 5:45 AM and you’re done with practice around 6:30 PM. When you’re younger though, your class schedule is a little crazier,” Elflein said. “I have a nice gap now, but when you’re younger, you’re just going all of the time, all day with classes and workouts. That’s hard.”

Not every class is a grind though. Elflein’s schedule during the recent finals week was alleviated by the fact that he had only had two actual final examinations. Most of his work came in the form of papers and presentation, including for a marketing campaign class that he took in the fall semester.

The coursework asked him to help design a campaign for OrderUp, a Baltimore-based company that operates in Columbus and 55 other markets around the United States, most of them college campuses. OrderUp is a food delivery service that sells no grub of its own, but rather delivers food from campus and urban restaurants – many of whom don’t have their own delivery services – to the hungry mouths of college students.

“We have to develop a campaign to raise action and awareness and raise sales by over $300 a day,” Elflein said. “We had to come up with this big idea with a budget and how to increase that, so that was a real-life application deal that was pretty fun.”

Still, even in classes he enjoys, Elflein isn’t quite just one of the normal students. He’ll often get recognition from professors and peers in the classroom for his field work on Saturdays at Ohio State.

“A lot of professors will say ‘Good game Pat’ and stuff like that, a lot of them are big football fans,” Elflein said. “But then again, some of them don’t even know what football is.”

Like many other students at Ohio State, Elflein lives in an off-campus house within just a couple blocks of the Ohio State academic campus. Along with a few other students, he shares the home – affectionately called the “Slob House” – with Decker and Ohio State kicker Jack Willoughby. It’s not all that different from the housing situation of any of the other tens of thousands full-time Ohio State students.

“With all the food they have here (for Ohio State football players), you honestly barely need to buy groceries. But when we do, we’ll get a bunch of chicken and steak and all the meats. We’ve got a big grill, so we’ll grill it all up,” Elflein smiled. “It’s just a normal house though, we clean up after ourselves, take the trash out. We’re humans too.”

In particular, Decker has become a player that Elflein has grown close with. Along with Jacoby Boren, another close friend and members of the Slobs as the Buckeyes’ starting center, the group has grown close. They’re the only three offensive line remaining from the 2012 recruiting class, Urban Meyer’s first at Ohio State since he was interning for Earle Bruce in the 1980s. Decker and Boren will both be moving on from Ohio State football this offseason, as their eligibility has expired.

“Being around [Decker], you know he’s my roommate too, so I’m always around him. It’ll be weird not having him around, it’s going to be different. But we’ll stay in touch, you know,” Elflein said. “Maybe one day we’ll meet up in the NFL. We’ve built a really strong relationship, so that would be cool.”

Elflein has a slightly different dilemma from those two. While they’re all fourth-year students at Ohio State, Elflein took a redshirt year unlike his two friends, leaving him with one more year of eligibility. He has not made a decision on whether to stay in Columbus or turn pro as he still waits on a draft grade from scouts and GMs, but he admitted that the prospect of playing in the scarlet and gray without those two by his side would be odd.

“That would be weird. All your good buddies are leaving. I have younger friends, but those are your boys you came in with and now they’re leaving. It’s kind of like Joel Hale situation – he came back, but all the guys he came in with are gone,” Elflein said. “It’d be a little different without your boys, but you just have to build bigger bonds with the guys coming up.

“We’ve been through everything together. Coming into this, you think you’ve worked hard and been through it all but you haven’t until you’ve been here. Just going through that with those guys, the double overtime at Penn State, the losses, and all the off seasons, the summers, all of that stuff. Going through that with these guys makes you close.”

Much like any other normal human, Elflein has deep personal connections and emotions in play for all of the choices he’s making in his life. He’ll undoubtedly by pushed and pulled and tugged and yank in a million different directions over the next month as he weighs his choice to come back to school or see what awaits him in the professional ranks. But as the fans flood his Twitter mentions and friends and family inquire to his status, it’s easier to forget that he’s still just a college kid looking for a degree and a job.