Hey, hey, where you been? But God talk is about to begin. Hey, hey, hey, come on in.

Welcome to Buckeye Talk, another market down Monday. In fact, this is the final market down Monday of the 2021 preseason.

I'm Nathan Baird from Cleveland.com along with Doug Lamarice and Stephen Means and we are marketing down our four playoff teams and predicting the national champion for the 2021 season.

I wanted to start off talking about Ohio State because we are in a state podcast and a lot of this discussion should be relative to Ohio State.

Where does Ohio State stand in our minds as a playoff team? You know, obviously made the last two playoffs.

They've made it for the first seven years. They've been as other than Clemson and Alabama's consistent as anybody at making the playoff and making some noise.

How is your opinion changed of this team over the course of the preseason or has it? Do you feel more excited or more enthused about Ohio State potentially making the playoff than you did?

I think very little has changed. I think about my opinion of Ohio State, which is I think they're very good in a lot of areas.

I think they're by far the best team in the big 10. I don't really know where I see a loss before the playoff, but they also have a couple question marks and maybe I'm almost surprised by how little my opinion has changed.

I don't feel like the secondary is solved. Well, be better than last year, but I think there are still reasonable questions in the secondary.

Actually, they did take one of their strengths on the offensive line and make it at least a little more interesting by moving guys around that now you're putting a guy at right tackle, who's never done it before.

And that's, you know, tackles more important than guard. And he's got to be to Juan Jones is going to be blocking that dressers. So that actually got a little more uncertain.

The guy who we thought was going to win quarterback won the quarterback spot. I think a lot of people have confidence in him for good reason, but he's never done it before and, you know, there's just that.

But I don't know that I'm going to say anything today that I would have said in March.

Yeah, I agree with that. Not outside of the offensive line thing, but even that's not a drastic enough thing to make you, you know, reevaluate your opinion of this team.

Nothing's really changed. Things have just maybe been put in set and stone that were maybe a little bit more penciled in nine months ago.

What struck me is I was preparing for this. I was thinking back to like 2019 coming out of the 2019 season.

How would we have looked at 2021 into the future and thought of a house state in terms of the playoff.

I think, and we may have even talked about this on the podcast. I think we could have looked at this as more of a transitional year.

Like if there was going to be, I think we even maybe even said this at one point. Like if there was going to be one year where it dipped, one year where a house state seemed more vulnerable to take a loss to maybe be on the outside of the playoff looking in.

It might have been this year. We knew it was going to be transitioning to a new quarterback going to be at that time.

We assumed a first time quarterback, which is what it turned out to be. We knew that there were going to be some, some losses of some pretty significant guys.

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