Bridget Lombardo
Ohio State’s Jermaine Mathews Jr. (7) tackles Texas’ Hollywood Smothers (2). Ohio State lost to Texas 24-23 on Sept. 12. Photo courtesy of Cassandra D’Angelo.
Three games into Ohio State’s 2026 football season, the Buckeyes have two wins of over 50 points and one, one-point loss.
Putting the blowouts aside, the 24-23 heartbreaker to Texas tells us the most about this team.
Yes, Ohio State opened its season Sept. 5 with a 56-3 win over Ball State and it certainly dominated Kent State 59-3 Sept. 19.
Neither game required the Buckeyes to protect a fourth-quarter lead. They didn’t have to quiet more than 100,000 opposing fans, or figure out how to respond when another national championship contender began cutting into their lead.
All three of these things occurred Sept. 12 in Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium.
Though the Buckeyes ultimately failed that test, allowing 21 unanswered points in the fourth quarter, that shouldn’t make the game less valuable than either of their blowout wins.
If the Buckeyes replaced the Longhorns with a nonconference opponent, they could have had another easy win. Instead, the loss dropped Ohio State’s playoff probability from 83.14% to 74.44%, a decrease of just 8.7 percentage points, according to the ESPN Football Power Index.
A perfect record doesn’t say much when a team has never been put in a position where losing actually feels possible.
Look at Ohio State’s team last season: the Buckeyes cruised to a 12-0 record in the regular season and never faced a second-half deficit.
Yet once Ohio State trailed in the second-half in the Big Ten championship to Indiana and the College Football Playoff quarterfinal to Miami, it lost both and its season abruptly ended.
If anything, September should be when teams start figuring out what they actually have before conference play begins.
Ohio State isn’t the only Big Ten team that has gotten that chance.
While then-No. 2 Oregon went on the road to play an unranked Oklahoma State Sept. 12 and lost 39-31, the Ducks then defeated Portland State 84-0.
That same week, unranked Michigan beat No. 11 Oklahoma to earn the No. 19 spot in the AP top 25 poll The Wolverines went on to defeat UTEP 52-17.
The difference between those two games should be pretty obvious.
Oregon fell to No. 21 in the AP poll the next week and probably learned more about itself in its loss at Oklahoma State than it did in its rout of Portland State.
Michigan should be able to take more from beating Oklahoma 17-10 than it can from a 35-point win over UTEP.
Blowout wins aren’t entirely worthless. Teams still have things they can work on, younger players get opportunities and a win is still a win
Ohio State didn’t know what would happen when it walked into the fourth quarter in Austin with a 20-point lead. Oregon didn’t know whether it would leave Stillwater with a win. Michigan couldn’t simply coast through the second half against Oklahoma knowing that the game’s result was already decided.
That’s exactly what the Big Ten should want out of at least some of its nonconference schedule.
It would be easy to go in the other direction — the Big Ten already has 18 teams playing nine conference games, so its programs don’t exactly need to look elsewhere for difficult opponents. The No. 7 Buckeyes still have to face No. 17 Iowa, No. 5 Indiana, No. 12 USC, No. 20 Oregon and, of course, Michigan at the end of the season.
At least one Big Ten program has already started scheduling less challenging nonconference games.
In August, Indiana initiated the cancellation of its 2030-31 home-and-home series with Notre Dame, leaving the Hoosiers without a Power Four nonconference opponent currently scheduled in future seasons. The move came a year after Indiana canceled its 2027-28 series with Virginia, replacing the Cavaliers with Kennesaw State and FCS opponent, Austin Peay.
Indiana shouldn’t become the blueprint for the rest of the conference.
Ohio State is scheduled to host Alabama in 2027 before traveling to Tuscaloosa in 2028, and the Buckeyes will travel to Georgia to face the Bulldogs in 2030. Michigan will travel to Texas in 2027 and has a home-and-home series with Notre Dame scheduled for 2033 and 2034. Michigan State will play the Fighting Irish in 2027 and Oklahoma State in 2028 and 2029.
Those are the kind of games that members of the Big Ten conference should keep on its future schedules.
Games like that come with a chance of losing, but that should be the point. If Big Ten teams are going to schedule some of the best teams in the country, not every one of those games is going to end in a win, but a loss can show a team a lot more than just another September blowout.
Yes, Ohio State lost to Texas.
But after beating Ball State and Kent State by a combined 109 points, the Buckeyes should know a lot more about themselves because of the one game they didn’t win.
*This article is a rough copy of a version originally published in The Lantern’s Big Ten Edition on Sept. 24, 2026.
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