“No play we make on the field—no touchdown, no interception—can compare to the Kingdom of God,” Caleb Downs told a sea of scarlet and gray. This was at Ohio State’s “Fall Kickoff: An Invitation to Jesus,” a campus-wide night of worship, testimonies, and next-step faith decisions led by Buckeye players and student groups. The lineup featured Downs, linebacker Sonny Styles, and linemen Luke Montgomery, Carson Hinzman, and Ethan Onianwa. The former Buckeyes Gee Scott and Kamryn Babb also joined them on stage as the crowd sang and players spoke, all wearing “Jesus Won” T‑shirts that set the tone for what came next. Organizers framed the evening as a simple invitation, but the atmosphere carried the same charge as an Ohio State pregame. Only this time, the scoreboard centered on changed lives rather than yards and points. 

The news arrived in the water: among roughly 50 people who chose to be baptized. Among them were two Buckeyes linebackers, Payton Pierce and Sonny Styles. The Lantern described it as a mass baptism that capped the night, with an estimated 2,000 registrations signaling how wide the invitation had stretched across campus since last year’s inaugural event.

Caleb Downs and current teammates helped lead, while Scott and Babb stood beside them.“God is good,” Caleb Downs told ABC 6 afterward. “I mean, I can’t take credit for it. None of my teammates can take credit for it. At the end of the day, His glory is above anything that we can do, but we know Jesus is real, and we know that if you believe in Him, you will be saved,” he said, framing the whole night as grace first, platform second.

That dovetailed with the program’s approach to the gathering, giving players the mic, telling the truth about struggle and hope, then creating space for a response, right down to the simple altar call that opened the tubs for anyone ready to take that step. Caleb Downs’ onstage reminder that football’s biggest moments are still small next to eternity gave the baptisms a thorough line the crowd could feel from the first song to the last splash.

Styles’ path to the water started long before Monday night, and he said so on stage: “Seeing the way they lived their life, seeing the joy they have, it really just had me curious… What’s that joy? What’s that life that they have? That’s kind of what attracted me to the Lord,” he explained. He put responsibility on it, too: “When you’re blessed with a platform and you’re put in a position — kind of on a pedestal — to lead, when you’re believing in Jesus, I think you’re called to lead,” he told ABC 6, connecting faith to the same accountability Ohio State asks of its captains.

It fits the linebacker who wears the program’s “Block O” jersey in 2025 and serves as a team captain, roles that coaches say he earned by living the standard before he ever spoke it into a microphone. The Lantern put the reach at about 2,000 registrations, nearly double last year, for a second straight September that turned the Curl Market into a chapel with a student section. The format stayed familiar by design: collaboration across student ministries, worship at the center, players telling their stories, and an open invitation to be baptized for anyone ready to mark a new start in public. By the time the players stepped off the stage, the tubs were already filling, and a long line curled under the lights as friends and strangers cheered every time someone came back up smiling.

All of it unfolded with a title-defense season humming in the background, Ohio State remains No. 1 in the AP poll, started 2-0, dropped 70 on Grambling State, and hosts Ohio University on Saturday, but the message from the captains was that football is the stage, not the story. Downs called it a source of strength, “I think we know that’s where our strength comes from… us humanly, our power is not enough.” 

And the team treated the night like a different kind of walkthrough, one that ends with teammates shoulder to shoulder as choices get made for reasons that outlast a scoreboard. On a campus that measures the calendar in big games, the Buckeyes spent a Monday proving that the biggest wins can happen in the quiet, and that’s the kind of legacy a locker room carries long after the lights go out.