Former Buckeyes and current Steelers Jack Sawyer and Will Howard left Columbus and entered the NFL without an elusive pair of gold pants, but they did leave the program with something much sweeter, at least according to the two NFL rookies.
Appearing together on an episode of former Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger’s “Footbahlin” podcast on Tuesday, both Sawyer and Howard indicated that the team’s national title win last year trumps any victory they would have earned over the hated Wolverines in their Buckeye careers.
“Winning a national championship (is more important than beating Michigan),” Sawyer said. “And don’t get – that takes no emphasis off how important The Game is. “If anyone tells you they’d rather go 1-12 and just beat The Team Up North (and not win a national championship) you’re crazy. You’re playing this game to win championships.”
“Me just being new to the rivalry – and obviously I was a Penn State fan. …But I think that the rational Buckeye fan would say, ‘Give me the championship every day of the week.’ I would hope so,” Howard added.
Sawyer, who grew up an Ohio State fan and finished his four-year Buckeye career winless against the Wolverines, added that losing The Game was not the end-all-be-all last season due to the expansion of the College Football Playoff to 12 teams, which allowed his team to switch gears following the loss and focus on what he said was the “ultimate goal” of winning a national title.
That could not be said in previous seasons where the winner of The Game would likely be headed to the College Football Playoff or Rose Bowl, with the loser sent home without a chance to earn some meaningful hardware.
“Make no mistake about it, no one wants to beat those guys more than we do, but at the end of the day, there’s nothing we could have done after (losing to Michigan),” Sawyer said. “We have our shot to chase the ultimate goal, which is to win the national championship. In the NFL, you lose four games in the regular season and you’re probably the No. 1 overall seed in the playoffs. That’s kind of the approach we took, especially with the expanded playoffs, and I think it’s gonna continue to be like that.”
Despite the rivalry having much different implications in this current era of college football compared to previous ones, both Sawyer and Howard made sure to emphasize that defeating Michigan is still extremely high on the Buckeyes’ priority list.
“We literally talk about (the rivalry) every single day,” Howard said. “There’s a huge emphasis on it, like, no M’s in the building, can’t wear blue. I don’t think I’ve worn blue this whole year. It’s very, very – it runs really deep. It means a lot to a lot of people.”
“Obviously, The Game is still gonna be The Game, because it is The Game, the best rivalry in sport,” Sawyer added. “But at the end of the day, I think you’d be crazy to say you would rather beat them and not win a national championship instead of win a national championship and not beat them. In a perfect world, you do both of those things, but obviously we didn’t. But winning a national championship kind of erases all of that. For me, it does, at least.”
