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Welcome to Buckeye Talk. It is Thursday, May 19th, because it's a Thursday, you know, that is the rebranded day for the rebranded Buckeye football futures. I'm Nathan Baird from Cleveland.com.

He's Steven Means. We've been going kind of position by position each week, talking about how Ohio State got to this point on its roster through recruiting and where it's going with recruiting in each of those spots.

We've done running backs. We've done receivers to go check those out the last couple of weeks. This week we're flipping to the other side of the ball. We are talking about defense and we are talking specifically about linebackers and the bullet position.

And that's an important distinction to make because they are not linebackers, technically, they are actually right now going into the fall of 2021 and through the spring, the spring that we just had.

The bullet contenders for Ohio State were working with the safeties, but Steven, why should we talk about bullets at the same time we're talking about linebackers on a recruiting podcast.

Yeah, I think it's just because now that we know what the bullet is in terms of a human being like we always know what it was. It was a hybrid between a linebacker and a safety. They've been saying that for two years.

Now that we see human beings playing the position and we saw Craig Young, his body type, a guy who leans linebacker with safety skills.

But we also see Ronnie Hickman, who's a safety with some linebacker ability. We can approach it in a certain way. Okay, what room gets the it's impacted the most by the recruiting this position and playing it on the field.

Ideally, Ohio State's in a 425 at this point, right? There's going to be two inside linebackers and then there's going to be a bullet.

So because because you're only playing two inside linebackers, you're probably recruiting less linebackers or one of the people you're recruiting who's probably classified as a linebacker isn't going to be playing linebacker by the time he gets here.

He's going to be playing that bullet position just like with Craig Young. He was recruited here as a linebacker, but now he's playing that.

And so if we were going to talk about the bullet, we have to talk about it with the position where it's most impacted as far as playing time for a different position, but also how they recruit that position.

So it only makes sense naturally to still talk about the bullet with the linebackers, even though when we did see the bullets, they were practicing with safety that day.

We bring up the 425 thing. We had a question for our hey, Buck, I talked segment about that that I answered earlier this week and I don't think I articulated one part of that very well, which is it's still hard for me to call what Ohio State is doing a true 425 to me.

That or a 335 those things are when you're putting five clear defensive backs on the field, this to me is more like a 4214.

You can't really do that, I suppose you have to call it one or the other, but if, for instance, if Craig Young plays more snaps than anybody else at bullet this year, that's not that different than just having a 434.

It's it is different, but it's not significantly different. I think if someone like Ronnie Hickman were to play all those snaps, then it does feel like more like a 425.

We're getting into a bit of a semantic argument, but I think the other point you're making is an important one, which is right now, Ohio State pulls one linebacker out and sends him off with the safety.

They already had court Williams kind of floating when he was healthy floating around and then you got Ronnie Hickman as a safety, still working with the safeties, but designated as a bullet.

And then all the other linebackers get crammed into two spots and that's where I'm really intrigued going forward is what does that do.

We've always talked about how does the idea of the bullet effect of how state recruiting in terms of are they identifying an athlete that fits that spot and going after them.

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