COLUMBUS, Ohio –– An electric Ohio State debut wasn’t a surprise for Demario McCall. In fact, he might even have been expecting it.

The No. 66 overall recruit in the class of 2016, it was business as usual for the North Ridgeville, Ohio, all-purpose back when he found the end zone twice against Bowling Green State in the season opener of his true freshman campaign nearly a full five years ago.

“I wasn’t surprised when I scored two touchdowns, because coming out of high school I was already balling,” McCall said Friday after Ohio State practice. “So I just felt like, ‘Just keep doing what you’re doing.’”

However, the explosive performance was not a sign of things to come.

Stints at running back, wide receiver and kick returner have all proved largely unfruitful for McCall over the past half decade, but with most outside observers questioning what he stands to gain from remaining in the program, McCall has stuck around to reinvent himself once again.

Now at cornerback, McCall is still hopeful that his sixth season in Scarlet and Gray could be his most impactful.

“I feel like a lot of people who would have been in my shoes right now would’ve transferred or left. That’s the easy way,” McCall said. “I just feel like me being me, and just coming from where I come from, the transition from receiver to corner was almost the easy part for me. It wasn’t a hard choice for me to make at all. It wasn’t, at all.”

After tallying 354 yards from scrimmage and four touchdowns in his true freshman season, including 90 yards and two scores in his first game alone, McCall has accounted for 511 yards and four touchdowns in the past four seasons.

But offense has never been the only side of the ball that McCall knew how to play.

From youth football through high school, McCall said he has long had the techniques of a defensive back in his pocket, and that it hasn’t taken all that much for him to jump right back into the thick of things.

“It’s more so remembering, but learning the technique again,” McCall said. “It wasn’t a hard transition for me. I’m an athlete, I’m a football player –– played football my whole life. So it was nothing new to me. It was probably new to Buckeye nation and the guys who can’t see me on defense or who didn’t watch me in high school or before that. But I played defense my whole life until I got here.”

By all accounts this offseason, McCall’s latest position switch isn’t going half bad.

Defensive coordinator Kerry Coombs said McCall is a “rep-eater” in practice, and that on more than one occasion, secondary coach Matt Barnes has pointed to McCall’s technique as being the best of the bunch in the meeting room.

“He’s a piece of clay. He just does everything the way we tell him to do it, because he’s never done it before,” Coombs said. “Whereas other guys do things the way they want to do it, because they’ve done it before. Not Demario. So he is doing things exactly the way –– because he doesn’t know any better, and you love that about Demario. And he’s high energy, he’s quick-twitch. I’m excited to watch him play.”

McCall might disagree with Coombs on the notion that he hasn’t done it before, but it’s inarguable that he is going up against far better talent than he ever did playing defense in high school.

McCall said he hasn’t been intimidated by the likes of Chris Olave and Garrett Wilson at wide receiver though, because the practice environment is always centered around improvement. Just a year prior, McCall was in the same position room with the two players he now faces off with in practice.

Bouncing back and forth from one offensive position to the other with little reward for over the years, McCall has had his share of frustrations, and they’ve required frequent conversations with family members and teammates to work through.

But McCall said he can’t be broken that easily.

“One thing about me, I’m gonna stay positive. I see all the comments –– I see it all, I hear it all,” McCall said. “But one thing I will never let you do is see me down. That’s why I will not let you see me down. Every time you see me, I’m gonna be smiling, positive, chest up, head high, just like I was brought up.”

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McCall said he considered transferring out of the program a number of times, but the camaraderie with his teammates kept pulling him back.

“The thing that made me stay here was the brotherhood that’s here,” McCall said. “It’s hard to leave. It’s hard to leave the love and the brotherhood and the guys in the locker room. That was my biggest thing, to be honest.”

Unlike when he entered the Buckeye program in 2016 as a heralded high school prospect, there are no expectations for McCall as he opens his sixth fall camp in Columbus. In fact, if McCall sees rotational time at all on the Ohio State defense, it would likely come as a shock to most.

Well, maybe all but one, anyway.

“I think I can have a big role this year. Big one,” McCall said. “As long as I keep doing what I’m doing out on the field now, I think I can have a big one.”