Mark Pantoni deserves some blame for Ohio State’s disastrous 2026 season

Mark Pantoni was hired at Ohio State all the way back in 2012, having previously served as a recruiting program coordinator under Urban Meyer at Florida. Joining Meyer in Columbus, Pantoni has functioned as the Buckeyes’ general manger and director of player personnel.

Pantoni’s official role puts him in charge of all administrative duties for personnel and recruiting. His primary focus is roster construction, which includes player evaluations both in recruiting and in the transfer portal, NIL negotiations and coordinating official and unofficial campus visits.

Looking at Ohio State’s current depth chart, its hard to think that the roster construction of the past two years has been up to par with program standards, and Pantoni deserves some of the blame for the team’s lack of talent accumulation in a few key areas.

The biggest and most glaring issue has been the transfer portal, where after bringing in an absolutely incredible transfer class prior to the 2024 season, the last two years have been a complete disaster.

It would have been impossible for the Buckeyes to replicate the success of that 2024 group. Ohio State added only eight players that offseason, but six of those eight were monumental for the team’s success in its national title campaign.

Caleb Downs, Will Howard, Quinshon Judkins, Will Kacmarek and Seth McLaughlin all started — and excelled — in that 2024 season, and Julian Sayin would start for the next year and a half prior to his injury. Without Downs, Howard and Judkins, specifically, the Buckeyes do not win the 2024 College Football Playoff.

Again, there is no way Ohio State could have been expected to find that level of star power in the transfer portal every single year. That being said, these last two transfer portal classes for the Buckeyes have been nothing short of a catastrophe, and it has played a pretty significant role in 2026’s shortcomings, among other things.

Ohio State added 11 guys via the portal in 2025. Of those guys, only four saw the field regularly, and only really 1.5 of them made what could be considered an overtly positive impact in Columbus.

There were five supposedly big names among that group: Beau Atkinson, Phillip Daniels, CJ Donaldson, Max Klare and Ethan Onianwa. Klare and Donaldson were the best of the bunch, and neither was used correctly at Ohio State.

After totaling 685 receiving yards and four touchdowns at Purdue in 2024, Klare’s numbers dropped to 448 yards and only two touchdowns with the Buckeyes in 2025. Of course, he was now sharing targets with Jeremiah Smith and Carnell Tate, but it felt like Ohio State never fully maximized his potential as a receiving threat, especially with Sayin struggling to see the middle of the field at times.

Donaldson was a decent running back for the Buckeyes, leading the team with 10 rushing touchdowns despite having almost half the touches of Bo Jackson and less than half the rushing yards. Ohio State obviously wanted to use him as a change-of-pace power back for short yardage situations, but after making him slim down that offseason, his effectiveness was limited.

Onianwa and Atkinson were total busts. Supposed to be one of the highlights of the class, Onianwa played only 96 total snaps for the Buckeyes and was one of the worst graded players on the entire team, per PFF. Atkinson, after posting 12 tackles for loss and 7.5 sacks at UNC in 2024, has totaled 1.5 sacks in 20 games at Ohio State, and continues to steal money from the program with every additional snap he takes this season.

Daniels has played more than 1,000 snaps at Ohio State, but was not very good to begin with and has seemingly only gotten worse as time has gone on, thanks in part to a severely under-qualified offensive line coach in Tyler Bowen.

If you thought the 2025 transfer class for Ohio State was bad, the 2026 class is probably even worse, but in a different way.

The Buckeyes seem to have attempted to go for quantity over quality this past offseason, adding 17 guys via the transfer portal prior to this season. Of that group, only nine see significant playing time, and of those nine only about six have made a positive impact.

More than a few of the ‘bigger’ names in this transfer class have been outwardly bad.

Defensive tackle James Smith, cornerback Cam Calhoun and tight end Mason Williams are among the worst players in their respective position groups. Terry Moore was brought in to potentially compete for a starting job in the secondary, but has played 38 total snaps this season, and only five in the last six games. Kyle Parker has hardly played at wide receiver either, even with several injuries in that room.

A few guys have been okay, but not game-changers.

Qua Russaw has been fine at defensive end, but he has only one sack and 3.5 tackles for loss through eight games played. Ja’Kobi Jackson was solid at running back before his injury, but wasn’t exactly elite. Connor Hawkins has been an upgrade at kicker, but missed his only important field goal attempt of the season in the loss to Texas.

Of the 17 guys that Ohio State added via the portal, only really Christian Alliegro, Earl Little Jr. and John Walker have been true impact players.

Put a different way, the Buckeyes have added 28 players via the transfer portal over the last two seasons, and only five of them have been clear Ohio State-caliber players. That is a hit rate of under 18%, which is obviously not good enough.

It isn’t like there has been a lack of options for Ohio State in the transfer portal, but poor player evaluations and a lack of willingness to spend on truly elite players has kept the Buckeyes out of the running for some of the better available names over the last two years.

There have been more than a few top tier guys that have shown interest in Ohio State, only to end up elsewhere because Pantoni and the staff were unwilling to entertain their demands.

They could have gotten defensive end Damon Wilson, who has posted 12.5 sacks over the past two seasons at Missouri and Miami. They could have gotten running back Justice Haynes, who has averaged more than six yards per carry the last two years at Michigan and Georgia Tech. They could have gotten defensive lineman Francis Brewu or linebacker Rasheem Biles, both of whom are Ohio natives and are now both excelling at Notre Dame and Texas, respectively.

These are only a few guys Ohio State easily could have landed in the past two offseasons, but chose to cheap out and take far worse players at all of those respective positions, which are all now struggling.

Those poor player evaluations and a lack of NIL spending have also doomed the Buckeyes on the recruiting trail, most recently and most glaringly in the 2026 class.

Luke Wafle was going to commit to Ohio State before USC upped their offer, and the Buckeyes were unwilling to match. Now, Larry Johnson’s room has nobody that can get after the quarterback, and Wafle has as many sacks as a freshman for the Trojans as anyone on Ohio State’s roster.

Speaking of guys who spurned Ohio State in favor of USC, both tight end Mark Bowman and wide receiver Kayden Dixon-Wyatt decided to take their talents out West after getting better offers from Lincoln Riley and his staff. The KDW recruitment was obviously heavily impacted by Brian Hartline’s move to USF, but those are two guys who could be in Columbus right now if offered more NIL opportunities.

These issues were also true in the 2025 recruiting class. Ohio State lost top offensive tackle David Sanders Jr. to Tennessee because of NIL. They lost corner Na’eem Offord, who had been committed to the Buckeyes and flipped on Signing Day, to Oregon because of NIL. They missed on Ohio native defensive end Justin Hill to Alabama because of, you guessed it, NIL.

This doesn’t even include the guys that Ohio State is whiffing on now in the 2027 class because of poor NIL allocation, including elite running back target David Gabriel Georges. In fact, the Buckeyes still do not have a single running back committed in the 2027 class because of all the time it wasted chasing DGG with no backup plan, but that is a story for another column…

At the end of the day, Ohio State is not doing a good job of evaluating talent or negotiating its NIL deals, which falls squarely on the shoulders of Pantoni. The players the Buckeyes are bringing in via the transfer portal are not nearly good enough, and they aren’t adding enough top tier talent on the recruiting trail to make up for it.

Ohio State’s philosophy under Pantoni has been to prioritize paying guys that are already proven talents on the current roster rather than acquiring fresh faces. Unfortunately, a key flaw in this plan is that in order to have guys on the roster worth paying for, you need to acquire them in the first place.

We are in a brand new era of college football, and the methods that worked for Pantoni and Ohio State under Meyer in the early 2010s are no longer relevant. Pantoni and the Buckeyes have not properly adjusted to the new environment, and the roster has suffered as a result.

This Ohio State team is not anywhere close to as talented as any of Ryan Day’s teams before it, and with a coaching staff that is woefully out of it depth, all of the program’s issues are being compounded.

The player evaluations and NIL decisions simply must be better. Ohio State cannot continue to waste millions of dollars (allegedly) for terrible players like Ethan Onianwa and Beau Atkinson, both of whom are a microcosm of the dismal line play that has plagued the Buckeyes these last two years.

Pantoni deserves some of the blame for this lackluster roster that he helped build, and if he is unable to get with the times or put together a substantially improved transfer portal class this offseason, the Buckeyes are going to be in very bad shape in 2027 and beyond.