The linebackers are addressed before the quarterbacks in this article, which may be the only one I write on practice access this spring, but it’s important to note that Sonny Styles is working with the linebackers.
Styles played safety his first two years at Ohio State and was the top safety recruit in the 2022 class. He measured 6 feet 4 and 235 pounds when he reported for spring football. He demonstrated that he was a competent secondary player who could play both man-to-man coverage and come up and play the run.Though the first day of spring football practice at Ohio State might not provide conclusive answers regarding the depth chart, there were some intriguing changes. Here’s what I noticed during the quick open on Tuesday.
Ahead of making the unprecedented decision to step down from a head-coaching gig at a power conference school to accept a coordinator job, Chip Kelly knew he wanted to scale back his coaching duties following UCLA’s bowl game in December.
Kelly, who was named Ohio State’s offensive coordinator in February, said he enjoyed coaching UCLA’s quarterbacks so much ahead of the LA Bowl that he wanted to focus on coaching a specific position again.
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“It started when we were preparing for our bowl game,” Kelly said Tuesday as he spoke with reporters for the first time since making the move to Columbus. “Ryan who’s a great quarterbacks coach, left to go to Oregon State as a coordinator, so he wasn’t there. So I actually coached the quarterbacks for the bowl game.
“I had started to think, ‘I haven’t actually coached a position since 2008.’ I think my wife remarked, ‘I haven’t seen you this happy in a long time.’ To me, the best part of football is football. So, you’ve got to do football and not do some of the things involved with what a head coach does.”
