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Ohio State Faces Stiff Early Test

No. 4 Buckeyes to Visit Big Ten Rival Minnesota in Season Opener

The No. 4-ranked Ohio State Buckeyes begin life without Justin Fields in Week 1 of the 2021 college football season. They have a lot of talent, but they have inexperienced quarterbacks who have to prove themselves. That is not something the Buckeyes have had to worry about the past several years.

Ohio State won’t have a cupcake game to start its season. The Buckeyes go right into conference play when they visit the Minnesota Golden Gophers, who struggled last season but will try to bounce back in an intriguing Big Ten West Division. This is one of the most interesting games played on Thursday, Sept. 2, and one of the most interesting sports betting point spreads to handicap.

Ohio State Buckeyes Minnesota Golden Gophers Preview
Jamie Sabau/Getty Images/AFP

Ohio State Buckeyes at Minnesota Golden Gophers

Date: Sept. 2, 8 p.m. ET

Location: TCF Bank Stadium, Minneapolis

CFB Odds: Ohio State -13½

Ohio State Buckeyes

The Buckeyes will see what they have at quarterback with C.J. Stroud, a product of a Los Angeles-area high school who hopes to make a name for himself. What will help Stroud a lot is the fact that wide receiver Chris Olave, who easily could have gone to the NFL after helping the Buckeyes reach the national championship game against Alabama, decided to stay in Columbus for one more year.

Having an elite veteran receiver should give Stroud an enormous comfort zone and provide a security blanket that a young quarterback greatly needs. As long as Stroud plays reasonably well, Ohio State will continue to hum along as the best team in the Big Ten.

If Stroud plays horribly, then the Buckeyes suddenly become vulnerable. Ohio State has maxed out against Big Ten opponents the past few years because its quarterbacks were exceptionally good. The big worry for OSU is that Stroud will stumble, but one shouldn’t expect it against this particular opponent, for reasons listed below.

Minnesota Golden Gophers

The Minnesota Golden Gophers won a New Year’s Day bowl game at the end of a sensational 2019 season. People wondered if they would be able to carry the momentum of that very successful season into 2020.

They did not. The real question is if the pandemic took a bigger bite out of the Gophers than many people expected, or if this team was going to be much worse no matter what else happened. That’s a hard question to answer.

Minnesota was working with a new offensive coordinator last season after Kirk Ciarrocca, a longtime assistant for head coach P.J. Fleck (the two worked together at Western Michigan several years ago), went to Big Ten rival Penn State. That did not help the overall cohesiveness of the offense.

Yet, the offense was not the main problem. The defense gave up 49 points to a bad Michigan team, 45 to Maryland, 35 to Iowa and 31 to Purdue. The Golden Gophers limited Wisconsin to just 20 points in the season finale, but the Badgers were limited by multiple key injuries to their wide receivers and looked like a shell of their former selves.

Coming off a 3-4 season, Minnesota will have to replace an elite receiver in Rashod Bateman, who was a first-round draft choice of the Baltimore Ravens. It is hard to know exactly what to expect from Minnesota after 2020 spun sideways in the middle of the pandemic.

Score Prediction: Buckeyes 38, Golden Gophers 20

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