With the fallout of Michigan’s sign-stealing scandal still looming, one ex-Ohio State star feels he and his teammates were robbed of a fair game back in 2022.
Sitting down for an appearance on Cam Heyward’s “Not Just Football” podcast, former Buckeyes captain and Steelers fourth-round pick Jack Sawyer gave his first public comments on the matter.
Telling his new teammate that something felt “weird” in one of OSU’s previous matchups with “The Team Up North.”
“I’ll say this,” Sawyer said. “I think they beat us straight up last year, obviously, and the year before. But my sophomore year, we left the field and we were like, ‘This feels weird.’ We lost by double digits, and it felt like we had beat the [expletive] out of them all game.”
“You know, we ran a screen pass that we had never put in — not the formation, not the look, anything,” the national champion recalled. “And, like, you see them on the sideline, they’re doing [the signals], and we change it, we audible to it or whatever, and when we run it, all the D-linemen as soon as the ball is snapped, the linebackers, everybody, they sniffed it out.”
“It’s just good scouting,” Sawyer laughed. “Come on.”
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Sawyer is far from the only member of that Ohio State team to say something felt off in that game. And after some initial sanctions and self-imposed penalties, Michigan could reportedly face even more discipline from the NCAA as soon as this week.
Big Blue has been hit with a total of 11 combined violations between the governing body’s sign-stealing and recruiting investigations, leading many to wonder how steep the punishment could be — with everything from suspensions to vacated wins on the table.
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