Ohio State had spent most of the 2025 season making the rest of college football look ordinary. The Buckeyes went 12-0 through the regular season and entered December with a chance to repeat as national champions. Their defense was dominant, allowing 16 points or fewer in every regular-season game. Then the games got tighter, and those unexpected losses came. Caleb Downs has a theory for that.
Watch What’s Trending Now!
“We won my sophomore year because we lost in the regular season to Oregon and Michigan,” Downs said on Ryan Clark’s The Pivot August 21 podcast. “We didn’t go through that in my junior year. That is why we lost to Indiana. You could tell, I mean, I could tell now. I can tell that at the end of the game, we were not ready for them to still be in the game. So when the game got close at the end, guys were like, ‘What’s going on?’ It’s like they’re a good football team.”
Ohio State’s 2024 championship run had a very different shape. The Buckeyes lost to Oregon and Michigan during the regular season. Those defeats created a level of urgency that did not exist in 2025. Ohio State had to respond, and it did. The Buckeyes eventually won the national championship. Downs saw the value in that experience.
“We weren’t playing against high-level competition,” Downs said. “Now it’s here. Are we going to be able to adjust to it? In some cases, we weren’t. We knew, like me and Coach Patricia, that Coach Walton already knew some of those things that were going to come up. So, it just sucks that we lost at the end of my career. That kind of was never part of the plan.”
The Hoosiers had gone 12-0 themselves and had plenty of reasons to believe they belonged. Ohio State, however, was still the defending national champion and the No. 1 team in the country. The game never turned into the shootout many might have expected. Indiana led 13-10 after Fernando Mendoza found Elijah Sarratt for a 17-yard touchdown. Ohio State had opportunities to answer. It simply could not finish them.
The Buckeyes reached the Indiana 5-yard line on one late drive before Julian Sayin was stopped on fourth down. Another possession ended with Jayden Fielding missing a 27-yard field goal. Ohio State finished with only 10 points despite moving into scoring territory repeatedly. That’s where Downs’ comments become more interesting.
It wasn’t like Indiana shocked Ohio State because nobody knew the Hoosiers were good. They knew. The problem was that Ohio State had not spent enough of the season feeling that kind of threat. And that issue followed them into the playoffs.
Miami made the same weakness harder to ignore. Ohio State had another chance to reset after the loss to Indiana. Instead, Miami delivered another uncomfortable game. The Hurricanes beat the Buckeyes 24-14 in the Cotton Bowl, holding Ohio State scoreless in the first half before pulling away. That ended the season at 12-2.