To Jim Knowles, the football field is his church. And if the football field is his church, he said, Ohio State is his Christmas.

This is what the Ohio State defensive coordinator opened with Thursday night, taking the stage to a room of eager high school coaches at the program’s coaches clinic.

Play after play, slide after slide, Knowles went through what he wants his defense to look like in Columbus: the multiplicity, the different looks out of the same coverages, changing the picture for opposing quarterbacks, how he wants to create confusion for opposing offensive coordinators, answering their “eye candy” with his own with different blitz packages and an emphasis on versatility.

Play after play, slide after slide, Knowles showed plays that worked, leading to sacks or interceptions that led to success for his Oklahoma State defense, breaking down each individual frame as to what led to that moment.

This isn't new for the Ohio State defensive coordinator. It’s what he’s been doing for four months since he arrived from his four-year stint in Stillwater. His audience was just different.

Coming in, Knowles likened his scheme to coursework, saying the install of his defensive schemes goes from level 100 to 400. But in his first days with his new players, the defensive coordinator knew he had to take a step back.

“It’s not about what I know, right? Players don’t care how much I know, but they know how much I care, so it is about just learning,” Knowles said after the first day of spring practice. “What can the guys that we have do best? Then it’s my job to take from the things that I know and boil down to what they can do best.”

Here’s the thing. Ohio State latched on quickly.

It’s a back and forth process, he said, downloading a bunch of plays and schemes and pulling back, calling the same defense over and over before another downloading session with the goal of getting everything on film so he and his staff can coach off it over the summer.

But to Tanner McCalister, getting the whole playbook on film this spring means more than just preparing for the next few months. It gives everyone involved the full picture, even if it’s not a perfect one.

“Everybody can see what the defense is going to look like,” McCalister, a redshirt senior safety who followed Knowles from Oklahoma State for his final season of college football, said. “That’s exciting that everybody’s really picking it up and you’re not just seeing guys lost out there. Guys look like they know what they’re doing, which is really good.’

So how much of that will Ohio State show in its spring game Saturday?

None of it.

Ohio State head coach Ryan Day said the Buckeyes’ defense will not be doing “a whole lot of his stuff in this game,” instead focusing on the fundamentals, running around to the football and playing hard.

“We’ve seen throughout these first 13 practices just the multiple looks, the confidence and just how well these guys play, just how decisive they are out there. I think that’s been done,” Day said. “Now we’ll get an opportunity to go play in The Shoe in front of a big crowd. It will be very, very basic, but it’s good for our guys to get in front of the crowd and play and have some fun and see some of the best players in the country.”

If anything, Day comes into the spring game impressed with the defensive transformation, with how much the unit has been able to handle in terms of the volume of the install, saying, during his coaches clinic lecture, that Knowles’ defense has been the identity of Ohio State throughout the spring.

The head coach sees decisiveness from a group led by his head coach of the defense, not second-guessing, not tentative, playing with the aim to anticipate as opposed to react.

To McCalister, that comes down to how the defense he’s known is being taught, from Knowles to former Duke defensive coordinator Matt Guerrieri, who’s a senior analyst and advisor with the Buckeyes to Ohio State defensive graduate assistant Koy McFarland, who was Knowles’ assistant linebackers coach at Oklahoma State.

“I think having other coaches that have been in his defense as well and then having me as a player… everybody’s really in every room getting the taste of somebody that’s done it before, somebody that’s been in it before,” McCalister said.

“In our individual meetings, guys are really getting to see firsthand like, ‘Oh, this is what I’m supposed to do. This is how the defense looks.’”

There’s progress being made. McCalister sees it, Day sees it, Knowles sees it, flipping through slides on a practice field filled with high school coaches, eager to get a taste of what could come from the Ohio State defense in 2022.

It’s just progress that’s going to have to wait to be seen until Sept. 3 against Notre Dame.