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Buckeye Talk: Ohio State podcast by cleveland.com

Ohio State 2026 spring game draft: Putting together the best starting defense

Buckeye Talk: Ohio State podcast by cleveland.com

cleveland.com

Sports, Football

4.51.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2026

⏱️ 56 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Everyone is healthy and ready to play Saturday in Ohio Stadium in this version of an Ohio State spring game draft from Buckeye Talk. There are two full 22-player teams to be drafted, and Stefan Krajisnik and Andrew Gillis go head-to-head with their selections while Stephen Means moderates. With so many options on both sides of the ball, we’re splitting things up and doing just the starting 11 on defense. This should tell you something about the 2026 Buckeyes, with spring football winding down. It should help get you ready for Saturday. Thanks for listening to Buckeye Talk and sign up to get text messages from experts Stephen Means, Stefan Krajisnik and Andrew Gillis at 614-350-3315. Get the insider analysis, have your voice heard on the Buckeye Talk podcast and connect with the best Buckeye community out there. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hey, hey, where you've been?

0:17.7

Bucket talk is about to begin.

0:21.1

Hey, hey, hey, come on then.

0:28.6

Welcome back to Buckeye Talk.

0:34.4

I am Stephen Means.

0:35.1

That's Tafon Krasnick, and that is Andrew Gillis.

0:37.6

This is day two of spring game drafting Stefan versus Andrew, seeing who can draft the best

0:45.4

team. We did offense a couple of days ago and took a little reprieve so we could talk about

0:49.5

the offensive line and defensive line and now we're here to do the defense. Stefan had the number

0:54.1

one pick with the offense and so Gillis, you will get the number one pick with the defense. And then we'll have Stefan go back to back. And after that, we'll go back and forth after that. Gillis, you have been on the clock for 48 hours. So before you give your pick, we're going to do this like the real NFL draft and give you like an extra X amount of time that you do not need because you've been on the clock for four months. The Raiders are going to take nine and a half minutes to submit Fernando Mendoza's name. So what's going to happen? What? How did, when you were putting your board together. Yeah. Just tell us, take us through your, your mindset of what you were hoping to accomplish.

1:27.9

Well, I think one of the things that you look at is where your team is strong,

1:33.3

where your team is weak, where Stefan's team is strong. Because like that, when we were just

1:39.8

draft an offense, it was like, all right, I'm going to pick the best team I can. With this, there's a little bit of

1:45.9

strategy, I think, that goes involved. I think there are certain weaknesses of Stefan's team that I could

1:51.3

exploit, and it's like, how aggressive do you want to be? I think there's strengths of Stefan's team,

1:56.6

and it's like quite literally and figuratively, like how much do you want to play defense? You know,

2:00.8

you start to think how you can kind of weaponize the the wild card role like stephan picked

2:06.6

Maxwell Riley for his wild card to kind of like box me out and I was kind of like looking at it and

2:11.3

I was like you know I don't know how much of a difference there is between mason willham and

2:14.4

Maxwell Riley right now fine do you Fine? How aggressive can you be?

2:20.9

And I think the other part of this, with offense, that was the day to go first,

2:26.1

because JJ.

...

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