COLUMBUS, Ohio — Deep within Ohio Stadium, where they were temporarily shielded from a raucous crowd of more than 107,000 fans still delirious with post-national championship delight, Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian and his polarizing quarterback, Arch Manning, sat in the visitor’s locker room studying film. 

It was halftime of college football’s most anticipated season opener in ages, a game that pitted the top-ranked Longhorns against third-ranked Ohio State in a rematch of last year’s College Football Playoff semifinal, and the two leading figures in the burnt orange brain trust were in disarray. 

Manning, making the first road start of his highly scrutinized career, had labored through the opening few possessions against the freshly unveiled defense of coordinator Matt Patricia, the former head coach of the Detroit Lions and noteworthy disciple of Bill Belichick after more than a decade with the New England Patriots. Patricia had employed certain wrinkles, Sarkisian would later explain, that confounded Manning in his attempts to diagnose what he was seeing after each snap. The statistics seemed to bear that out: By halftime, Manning only connected on five of his first 10 passes for 26 yards — with the 50% completion rate reflecting his repeated bouts with indecision. 

So inside the Texas locker room, coach and quarterback spent a good chunk of their allotted break analyzing clips of what Patricia had thrown at them, from the pinwheel-like rotations on the back end to the locational deployment of certain personnel for a unit replacing eight starters. They went so far as reconfiguring the way Manning would identify certain schemes for the remainder of the game. 

“I thought their ability to disguise coverages in the first half was at an elite level,” Sarkisian said in his postgame news conference. “I wouldn’t say a good level — an elite level. And I think it starts with [the fact that] they’ve got Caleb Downs.”

Downs, a junior safety, was the unquestioned star for a defense that largely stole the show during Ohio State’s rugged, roughened 14-7 win over the Longhorns, a victory that vaulted the Buckeyes to No. 1 in the country for this week’s AP Poll. Swaths of positional and intellectual versatility transformed Downs, arguably the best defensive player in college football, into an on-field representation of Patricia, the noted X’s and O’s tactician with a degree in aeronautical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. As the play clock wound down before any given snap, Downs could be seen passing hand signals and verbal instructions to everyone on the back end of Patricia’s defense, even realigning the bodies himself when some of his less-experienced teammates weren’t in their proper landmarks.

Such structural organization and accountability afforded Patricia, who called plays from the sideline with a trademark pencil tucked behind his ear, a staple of his time with the Patriots, the luxury of rattling Manning’s brain with different pre- and post-snap alignments, muddying the quarterback’s certainty about what the Buckeyes were actually doing. There were, according to Sarkisian, times when Downs & Co. showed a coverage shell featuring two deep safeties before transitioning into a one-high look when the ball was snapped; they blended odd and even fronts at the line of scrimmage; they mixed and matched which players were in a three-point stance to make Texas guess who would be rushing the passer; they found fascinating ways of morphing non-traditional, pre-snap alignments into more standard coverages like Cover-2 and Cover-3. All of it caught the attention of former coaches who analyze these things on social media and television alike. 

“I look at the Ohio State-Texas game,” said Bruce Arians, the former head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Arizona Cardinals, during an appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show” earlier this week, “and I see Matt Patricia just totally bamboozle one of the best young quarterbacks to ever come into the game. You’ve got two seconds to figure out where this ball is going. And if you’re seeing this and they’re playing that, if you don’t see it within those first three steps of your drop, you’re going to throw it to the wrong guy. 

“This is complicated now. For a college quarterback who is a young guy starting, this is the highest level you get of defensive football. And Ohio State did an unbelievable job for their young guys of not showing and giving it away.”

For Patricia to incorporate such vast and complex disguises was particularly impressive given the relative inexperience of Ohio State’s secondary. Though Downs and cornerback Davison Igbinosun, whose fourth-down pass breakup in the fourth quarter was among the biggest defensive plays of the game, were starters on last year’s national championship-winning squad, the other three defensive backs to log significant playing time against Texas were all foraying into drastically expanded roles:  

— The 67 snaps played by cornerback Jermaine Matthews Jr., a junior, represented 16.9% of his total playing time in 2024.

— The 65 snaps played by nicke back Lorenzo Styles Jr., a graduate student, represented 40.1% of his total playing time in 2024.

— The 67 snaps played by safety Jaylen McClain, a sophomore, represented 62.3% of his total playing time in 2024.

But the straw that undoubtedly stirred the drink was Downs, whose final tally of five tackles against Texas — tied for seventh-most on the team — hardly painted a picture of his ubiquitous influence on the game. Patricia seemed to sprinkle Downs across any and all parts of the field on Saturday, forcing Manning and the Longhorns’ offensive line to locate him before every play. Downs spent 24 snaps apiece as a traditional free safety and at his lurking/rover/robber position closer to the box, an idea explored by former defensive coordinator Jim Knowles last season. He also played 12 additional snaps in the slot, five along the defensive line and two as a perimeter corner. The closer Downs aligned to the football, the more often he was deployed from the defense’s left side.

“Caleb is unbelievable back there as a field general,” Patricia said in his postgame news conference. “Just kind of making sure he’s calling out the coverages and the adjustments, or even some of the alerts that we have in those situations. That part was great to be able to see that in game action and kind of put that under our belt and improve on it as we go.”

The influence Patricia’s scheme had on Manning, whose two starts last season both came against far lesser competition, was as obvious visually as it was numerically: from the frantic footwork, inaccurate passes and cautious playcalling in the opening half to the pedestrian final stat line that showed just 17 completions on 30 attempts (56.7%) for 170 yards, one touchdown and one interception on a woefully underthrown ball, snared by Matthews along the sideline. 

His average time to throw against Ohio State — a metric tracked by Pro Football Focus that measures how much time elapses from the moment a ball is snapped until a pass leaves the quarterback’s hands — was an eye-opening 3.28 seconds, the third-slowest mark in the country among players with at least 30 dropbacks in Week 1. It was a clear reflection of how much time Manning needed to process what was happening in front of him, which certainly helped Patricia’s retooled defensive line. The only quarterbacks who held the ball longer on a comparable number of dropbacks were Alabama’s Ty Simpson (3.38 seconds) and Colorado’s Kaidon Salter (3.33 seconds), both of whom lost their respective openers. It’s also worth noting that Manning’s average time to throw across 101 dropbacks last season was significantly faster at 2.74 seconds. 

“They’ve got a very smart secondary,” Sarkisian said. “So they made Arch work.”

All of which is a feather in the cap for Patricia, whose stock had eroded after his tenure with the Lions ended in 2020 and his last stint as playcaller for the Philadelphia Eagles in 2023 was widely panned. There were more than a few eyebrows raised across college football when Day, fresh off a national title, tabbed an unemployed coach to run the defense, especially considering just how good Knowles had been the last two seasons. When and if Patricia could adjust to the college game, a level at which he hadn’t coached in more than two decades, since he served as a graduate assistant at Syracuse, was among Ohio State’s biggest unknowns entering the 2025 campaign.

But his smothering of Texas and its Heisman Trophy front-runner seemed to silence most, if not all, of those critics — at least for the time being. Patricia had outfoxed and outsmarted the Longhorns in Week 1 with a performance that turned back the clock on his career. 

“I’m proud of our guys for stepping up to that challenge all the way across the board,” Patricia said. “From the front end to the back end, I think those guys just did a tremendous job with the adjustments [because] we were moving a lot of different parts on them. So it was really, really a great effort by the players.”

Michael Cohen covers college football and college basketball for FOX Sports. Follow him at @Michael_Cohen13.

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