Over his last couple of seasons at Ohio State, Urban Meyer had relatively large numbers of captains on the football team.
He cited the fact that Mike Vrabel was never a captain for why he began to expand the pool of captains over his last few years.
With Ryan Day now in charge, the question of how many captains he would prefer is still up in the air.
Regardless of how many captains he will be comfortable with, there will be some new guys to consider this year. The Buckeyes lost five of their seven captains from last year. Middle linebacker Tuf Borland and safety Jordan Fuller are the only returning captains.
Day is expecting the captains to be voted on and named in the next couple of days.
“We usually do that in preseason,” Day said. “We get through the first week, then kind of let the players vote on it. That’s what we did last year.”
But how many captains will he have?
“Based on how the voting comes out, we’ll try to decide,” he said. “Sometimes when it’s really good leadership, you can find yourself with maybe four or five captains, sometimes maybe one or two. So we’ll kind of do the same thing this year. We’ll let the team vote, see how the votes come in.”
With two captains returning on defense and none on offense, it is clear where the need is this time around.
“You like to have a couple on offense, a couple on defense,” Day said. “Ideally you’d like to have a couple guys up front, a couple guys back end with the skill guys. That’s the ideal situation. We’ll see how the vote comes through and we’ll decide from there.”
Even when the vote does come in, however, the tallying isn’t truly complete until the coaches fill out their ballots as well, including strength coach Mickey Marotti, who spends more time with the players than anybody else.
They then essentially sign off on the ballots and then decide where the cut-off point is.
“The coaches in the end, I think once we get the numbers, we get together and we figure out here is what makes sense,” Day said. “The guys who get a lot of votes, they’re the ones that will go in. If there’s a gap in there, we decide how many we want to go in from there. Mickey is very much involved in that as well.”
As long as it’s cool with the guys in the locker room – doesn’t matter how many or what positions. It’s their team.
2 offense, 2 defense for the season…and one weekly game captain.
Not rocket science.
Why does it matter if it’s two captains or ten? Who are we to judge how many players are liked and respected by their peers? This team has more urgent concerns.
JP Robb- Captaincy is enough of a concern that the HC spoke on it at length. It matters because, if the wrong captains are chosen, it can become a source of weakness or division on a team ( yes, even a “strong” team). There are commenters on this site (I’m one of them) who believe the honor should be bestowed sparingly rather than liberally. There should NEVER be 9 captains on a football team. We shall see..
A couple items on the wish list for this topic:
1) Since there’s a new staff, I hope returning captains aren’t given the honor automatically. Some people aren’t cut out for it.
2) PLEASE make the cutoff no more than 5. It appears that waffling/finagling is a part of any football team’s captaincy selection process. “The guys who get a lot of votes” should be the captains, NOT the ones after any “gaps” in numbers- that’s where the undeserving ones can sneak in. If the players truly have the most pull in deciding (there are 100 players and 10 coaches), then let them decide without worrying about hurt feelings, position groups, etc. It’s not the same honor if too many players are named.