“As you can imagine, it didn’t take long for us to focus on Oregon,” coach Ryan Day said after the game. “As we leave the rocker room today, our focus is that we start with Oregon.”

The Buckeyes will travel to the Pacific Northwest for a conference game later in the week, and due to conference realignment, it could be a preview of the Big Ten Championship Game.

“That’s one of the reasons you come to Ohio State – obviously the realignment of the conference helps,” left guard Donovan Jackson said after the game. “That’s how you play in these big games. We have great respect for this team.”

Ohio State and Oregon will each enter at 5-0, and both teams are more or less living up to expectations heading into the first games of the season.

Oregon spreads its teams out and tries to throw the football all over the field. Ohio State dominated with a great defense and a strong, revamped offensive attack. But both teams longed to play against an opponent equally talented – or at least close to it. You will get it now.

“You have to watch the film every week and continue to identify your weaknesses,” Egbuka said. “Because they are there, they are in the film. You must not be aware of the fact that you have weaknesses. If we play Eugene and we’re the same team that was here today and we haven’t improved over the week, there’s a good chance we’ll lose. So we have to keep improving week after week and at the end of the year you will have something special.”

Ohio State’s players tried to hide the fact that they were looking forward to the game against Oregon, noting that they try to take it one game at a time each week. But quarterback Will Howard said in his postgame press conference that they knew they had a big matchup against the Ducks, which made the Iowa game all the more important.

However, viewed as a pure test, neither Ohio State’s offense nor defense will be able to compete against Oregon’s talent. The same can be said about Eugene this week.

“We saw a lot of different things, we were ready to stop the run, we saw a little bit of the passing game,” linebacker Sonny Styles said. “They have a really talented quarterback and really talented receivers. I don’t know if we’ve seen such talented people, but we have some talented people too. We face the best offense in the country every day and are therefore well prepared.”

Even though the season felt like a buildup to the Oct. 12 matchup, players did their best to avoid talking about ramp-up times or preparation for the showdown that will capture the eyes of the college football world.

But that’s exactly what the season had been up to this point: a five-game stretch in which Ohio State had to prepare for a matchup against a top-10 team in a hostile environment. And now there are no more setup or start-up times.

This is where Ohio State’s season really begins, in a way.

“It’s a different style of play, but Iowa is a good football team,” defensive end Jack Sawyer said. “They’ve got some good players, we came out and played well from the start, which was just huge for us… I think for us to come out this week and play like we did from the start, it’ll work out continue next week.” .”