It’s been several month since Ohio State cornerback Davison Igbinosun arrived on campus, uprooting his life to transfer from Ole Miss to Columbus to continue his football career, but despite the significant changes, he felt at home right after arriving with the Buckeyes.
“I feel like it’s been like very easy,” said Igbinosun, a native of Union, N.J., said in March, shortly after enrolling at Ohio State. “Ohio State has been very easy. It feels like home, like it feels like Jersey.”
In the months since, Igbinosun has continued his acclimation to Ohio State, a process that secondary coach Tim Walton said is going well for the former four-star prospect.
“Yeah, he got adjusted really well,” Walton said. “He’s a guy that’s smart. He really works at it. He picked things up well. He’s a diligent worker. He’s a guy that really puts time in to learn the system, and he took a lot of steps forward this spring, so now we’re looking for the progression of the summer of being able to carry it over and now get it started and get game ready.”
With Denzel Burke an incumbent starter at corner, Igbinosun is competing alongside Jordan Hancock – who started several games last season – for the job opposite Burke. While Hancock has started games at Ohio State, Igbinosun honed his craft with the Rebels, starting 10 games as a true freshman in the Southeastern Conference.
During that first season of college football, Igbinosun was named a freshman All-American, finishing with 37 tackles and five pass breakups. He did so by utilizing his 6-2, 187-pound frame, and he is now the tallest cornerback on Ohio State’s roster entering this season. Walton said that length will give him Igbinosun an advantage in coverage and allow him to take advantage of his physicality.
“It helps a lot, man. He gets hands on guys,” Walton said. “Him being right at 6-2, you start seeing the 6-3, 6-2.5 size receivers, he can match that because of that length, his competitiveness. That helps a lot (in) getting hands on guys at the line of scrimmage. It’s really going to be an advantage versus a tall receiver. It also helps at the top of the route as well, that height and length.”
Nothing is guaranteed for Igbinosun in terms of a starting job, but he performed well throughout spring practice, making a solid case to hold the starting job opposite Burke. As for his path moving forward, Walton said Igbinosun needs to keep “doing what he’s doing,” and if he continues to do so, it bodes well for Igbinosun seeing the field for Ohio State this season.
“He’s learning. He’s putting the time in. He’s competing,” Walton said in the spring. “He has a passion for the game. He has a good skill set. We just keep practicing and keep applying it, man, then we’ll evaluate it at the end of the summer when we get ready to start getting ready to go.”
