There is no shortage of excitement about the arrival of defensive end tandem Jack Sawyer and J.T. Tuimoloau, the first pair of five-star linemen in the same class for Ohio State since the class of 2012 (Noah Spence, Adolphus Washington).

Ohio State is not unaccustomed to signing and developing top defensive linemen with names like Joey Bosa, Nick Bosa and Chase Young all very fresh on the minds of Buckeyes fans from across the nation.

To say that the expectations are high from fans for both Sawyer and Tuimoloau would be a mild understatement. People are quick to forget that Sawyer did not play a senior season of football and while he was an early enrollee at Ohio State, it has been quite some time since he has been in a competitive game.

And as for Tuimoloau, he did have a senior season but he only just arrived at Ohio State. While July arrivals are not a completely foreign thing with not every player being able to take advantage of the early signing option, he has been an Ohio State commit for less than two weeks and has not had Mickey Marotti’s workout regimen in front of him for long, so it will be a rapid ramp-up to get into game shape with less than seven weeks to the start of the 2021 season.

It got us to thinking about how quickly some of Ohio State’s other star defensive linemen fared in their first games and season. Was success immediate? Was opportunity there from the word go? What did those first-year totals look like?

We take a look at Ohio State’s last four “big time” defensive linemen and see how things looked during their expectation-filled first years with the Buckeyes.

Believe it or not, Joey Bosa was the fifth-highest rated recruit in the class of 2013 for Ohio State and it was easy to lose track of Bosa in a class that also had names like Ezekiel Elliott, Vonn Bell and JT Barrett in it, granted, we did not know who was going to hit and who was going to miss at the time.

The 2013 team had players like Noah Spence, Adolphus Washington and Michael Bennett already on the line and not much was thought when Bosa would enter the season opener against Buffalo late and record his first tackle of his career in what could be considered ‘garbage time’ as the Buckeyes held a 20-point lead with seven minutes left in the game.

Would anyone know what the Buckeyes had in a game against No. 16 Northwestern when Bosa would drop NU quarterback Trevor Siemian in the 3rd quarter, or later in the 4th on the final drive?

People may have started to get an idea on the final play of the game when Bosa recovered a Northwestern fumble in the end zone to give the Buckeyes a 10-point win and make some members of the betting public happy that a certain number was reached.

Joey would end his first season with 44 total tackles, 7.5 sacks (second on the team, only .5 sacks behind Spence) and 13.5 tackles for loss.

The younger Bosa came in as a five-star, talented in his own right and with the benefit of everyone seeing what kind of monster that Joey had developed into and that the Bosa bloodlines ran thick with football.

The 2016 team had Tyquan Lewis and Sam Hubbard in as game one starters but also had guys like Jalyn Holmes, Dre’mont Jones, BB Landers and others providing depth on one of Ohio State’s deepest lines in recent memory.

Bosa got into the season opener against Bowling Green and recorded his first tackle in the 3rd quarter and recorded his first sack in the fourth, a 13-yard sack of James Knapke in the opening minutes of the frame.

Nick would end up with five sacks on the year, seven tackles for loss and would appear in all 13 games as Larry Johnson would hold true with his substitution patterns and spread the snaps around.

Nick’s numbers may not have been as prolific as Joey’s as the 2013 team recorded 42 sacks compared to 28 for the 2016 team, but the sacks were distributed more evenly in ’16, surely a sign of more depth and sharing the load amongst the unit.

There were a lot of returning names going into the 2017 season and that meant that it was going to be an uphill battle for Chase Young to see meaningful minutes, five-star or not.

The opening game starting lineup book shows five starting linemen for Ohio State with Lewis, Bosa, Jones, Hubbard and Holmes.

People would be hard pressed to remember Young coming into the game against Indiana in late action and even more challenged to remember that his first tackle was against running back Morgan Ellison with less than four minutes to go in the game. But that would be the first of many tackles for the talented defensive end.

We would have to wait until October however for Young to record his first sack and he would do it against his home state school of Maryland. In typical Chase Young fashion, it would be a spectacular play where he would force a fumble of Max Bortenschlager with Jashon Cornell recovering the ball as part of an Ohio State 62-14 drubbing of the Terps.

Young would emerge in his next two seasons with year one having much more modest numbers of 18 tackles and 3.5 sacks in nine games played.

Everyone is still waiting for Harrison to emerge into the type of player that people were expecting to see. The 2019 season saw all of the attention on Chase Young and that was both good and bad. It meant that Harrison was not going to draw many double-teams with teams having to put two or more players on Young, but it also meant that Harrison faded into the background to a degree.

Harrison would end up 6th on the team in sacks on the year, nobody getting close to Young’s 16.5 on the season but players including Davon Hamilton, Baron Browning, Malik Harrison and Jashon Cornell would put up more sacks than Zach on the year.

Harrison would appear in Ohio State’s first two games of the season and would not record a stat but in game three against Indiana, Harrison would break through and sack Peyton Ramsey for a six-yard loss in the 4th quarter, his first career sack.

Harrison would end the season with 24 tackles and 3.5 sacks and then would have to go through the COVID-shortened and altered 2020 season. The hope is this will be the year where he can take that big step forward.