COLUMBUS – Ohio State has three prime candidates to become breakout stars at defensive end in 2022.
All three are former five-star prospects, and all three are among the 15 highest-ranked defensive players the Buckeyes have ever signed.
Zach Harrison, J.T. Tuimoloau and Jack Sawyer headline a defensive line that Buckeyes coach Ryan Day said this week “should be the strength of our defense up front.”
Defensive line coach Larry Johnson boasts a good balance in his room of veterans and budding talent eager to see heavy snap counts and show what they can do. Javontae Jean-Baptiste and Tyler Friday will work in at defensive end, and Taron Vincent, Jerron Cage, Tyleik Williams, Ty Hamilton and Mike Hall are among the leaders inside.
But it’s the triumvirate of Harrison, Tuimoloau and Sawyer that forms what could be a fearsome trio for Big Ten opponents to game plan for and for potential College Football Playoff foes to scheme against.
Harrison leads the way as the group’s veteran leader. Instead of entering the NFL Draft early and becoming either a Day 2 or Day 3 selection, Harrison returned for one more go-around with the Buckeyes and one more chance to add to his repertoire under Johnson’s tutelage.
He is listed as Pro Football Focus’ No. 7 returning edge player after earning a 90.5 pass-rush grade and 19.4 percent pass-rush win rate over the last two seasons.
“I just gotta improve in all areas and become a better player,” Harrison said on Thursday. “That’s something that I’ve been working towards this offseason.
“I just feel like I'm still an unfinished product because I still have a lot of areas to improve in and really I want to improve every area of my game. I want junior year Zach to pale in comparison to senior year Zach, and that’s what I’m working towards.”
We broke down Tuimoloau’s candidacy as a potential breakout player on Wednesday as he has the ceiling to explode as one of college football’s young defensive stars in 2022. Tuimoloau shocked pretty much everyone by getting to campus in July with less than two months to prepare for the season but still earning immediate snaps en route to playing the fourth-most snaps of any Buckeyes defensive end.
Now he’s had a full offseason in Mickey Marotti’s weight room. He has added more size and explosiveness that will carry over to the fall, and there is still the rest of the spring and summer to work.
“It was fun. All the hard things and tough things was fun,” Tuimoloau said of the Buckeyes’ strength and conditioning program. “I loved every bit of it. I got a lot out of it physically. I changed my body, and I’m going to continue changing my body like that. I got everything out of it.
“I feel very different body wise. I got some work in with Coach Mick, but I think this whole offseason, I felt like a big difference of just how my body felt. And I feel stronger and much faster.”
Sawyer isn’t far behind his own emergence to become one of Ohio State’s next All-American defensive ends. He is listed as one of PFF’s sleeper picks just outside of the top 10 to keep an eye on this season after he earned a 78.6 pass-rush grade and recorded 11 pressures on 101 pass-rush snaps.
“Coach Mick and Coach Day thought we lacked [leadership] a little bit last year,” Sawyer said. “So this offseason, they've been drilling that into us and trying to make everybody a better leader. I think it's kind of helped all of us get closer together as well. And our D-line, we’ve just been busting our asses in the offseason, so we're looking forward to being able to show the country who we are this year.”
It’s remarkable that Ohio State has three guys on the same depth chart who enter a season with as much hype as they do and who each would be the most talented, highly touted defensive end on more than 100 of the other 130 teams in the sport’s Division I level.
All three are capable of rising to the level of All-Big Ten caliber on paper. If just one does so, it offers a big edge for what Jim Knowles can do in his first season. If two or all three do, we could be looking at a one-year turnaround on the defense.
The Buckeyes don’t have that one purely dominant, lethal defensive end like Chase Young who could destroy games all by himself. So this trio might be more reminiscent of two of the other top Buckeyes defenses of the last decade.
Need for dominant game wreckers
The dominant Ohio State defenses of the 2010s were defined by one unit: a powerful defensive line led by game wreckers on the edge.
There have been three seasons since the Urban Meyer era began in which Ohio State finished in the top five nationally of opponents’ points per game. In each one, the Buckeyes boasted at least one fearsome pass rusher:
– 2015: Tyquan Lewis (eight sacks, 14 tackles-for-loss), Joey Bosa (five sacks, 16 TFLs) and Sam Hubbard (6.5 sacks, eight TFLs)
– 2016: Lewis (eight sacks, 10.5 TFLs), Hubbard (3.5 sacks, 8.5 TFLs) and Nick Bosa (five sacks, seven TFLs)
– 2019: Heisman Trophy finalist Chase Young (16.5 sacks, 21 TFLs)
The Buckeyes have lost that edge on the edge over the past two seasons – campaigns mired by a poor defense (2020) and a putrid one (2021).
There has been five-star and high-end four-star talent in the trenches. But whether it was injuries, the stop-start COVID year or simply not enough players rising to the occasion, that unit has not come alive the way we have seen in years past.
There are reasons to believe that the two-year trend is coming to an end in Columbus, and the shiniest beacon of hope comes in the form of those two budding stars and the wyly veteran.
