COLUMBUS, Ohio -- You remember Dulé Hill’s character, Sam, from the movie “Holes” and how he kept going, “I can fix that” to any and every issue? Consider Marvin Harrison Jr. as the real-life version of that for the 2023 Ohio State football team.
Every time the Buckeyes run up into a problem this season ...
Any time it takes them a while to solve it no matter the level of the opponent ...
Or any time you feel yourself getting a little frustrated because your favorite team isn’t playing up to the ridiculously high standard that both you and they have set for them ...
Just say this little chant to yourself: Marv can fix that.
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Having trouble finding someone who can open against Penn State’s talent and overly-physical cornerbacks? Marv can fix that.
Has a team stubbornly decided to stay in a two-high safety shell because they refuse to sit back and get embarrassed by OSU’s potent passing attack? Marv can fix that.
Are you about to play in a College Football Playoff game where the talent level is super equated and every snap is about finding a small edge to get over the top? Marv can fix that.
It didn’t matter what the issue was last season, if he was on the field, Marv could fix that, up until the moment where the issue was him not being on the field in the final moments of a 42-41 loss to Georgia in the Sugar Bowl because he’d been knocked out with concussion symptoms. The good thing is that the 77 catches for 1,263 yards and 14 touchdowns he put up in 2022 were just his first extended offering as a college football player.
You can rest easy knowing there’s more where that came from and an encore performance might make what we saw last season look like an average, run-of-the-mill production.
Best attribute
He’s 6-foot-4 and 205 pounds but moves like he’s a much smaller human being. His route-running is more like a person who’s on his second NFL contract than someone who just hasn’t voted in a presidential election yet and doesn’t turn 21 years old until August. And he works like one, too, which is the best way for him to show off his value as a leader.
Harrison is what you would make on Madden if you were creating a player right down to his low-maintenance personality that’s mixed in with high-maintenance tastes.
“It’s always a joke (when the receivers go out to eat),” Xavier Johnson said. “If Reis (Stocksdale) picks it, it’s gonna be hibachi (because) he loves Dulé Hill. (Sometimes) we go to steakhouses (but) if Marv picks it, it’s Dulé Hill be a little more high-end. It’ll probably be Ocean Club or Jeff Ruby’s. We don’t make him pay, though.
He enters this season as OSU’s best player, and perhaps the best in the entire sport. He’s also the only player on this list of crucial Buckeyes who has already proven to be everything we think they are in the role they’re on this list for.
Biggest challenge
The one gripe about Harrison’s game is that right now he’s not the best playmaker in the world with the ball in his hands and even he knows that.
“One thing in particular that I’m focusing on is making plays after the catch,” Harrison said. “Trying to turn five yards into 20 or 20-yard catches into 60.
Of his 1,263 yards last season, 323 came after the catch, which is 4.2 yards per catch (16.4 total yards per catch). That’s about a quarter of his production per catch, which isn’t bad for an X-receiver, but ranked t-199th among wide receivers with at least 40 catches last season.
Expect his touches (6.1 per game last season) to go up as the player the offense will be built around this season. That means he’ll need to do more with it once he gets it, especially since teams will be selling out to minimize those touches as much as possible. That 199 ranking will need to drastically improve.
Best-case scenario
He’s so good that it’s apparent that he’s the engine behind why Ohio State’s offense is so good and not its quarterback, even if that person is playing up to the new program standard. The already built-in hype matched with the actual production and impact resulted in him winning every Big Ten and national award any “best wide receiver in the nation” would win. Because he’s that unique he takes it a step further by challenging for things like the Maxwell Award, Walter Camp Award and even the Heisman Trophy.
That second part is what makes it hard to imagine because you’re asking him to walk a thin line that only Michigan’s Desmond Howard and Alabama’s Devonta Smith have ever walked as wide receivers to win the Heisman.
Likelihood: 35%.
Worst-case scenario
There are only two ways one can even think of where Harrison isn’t a repeat All-American - at a bare minimum - this season.
The first is the abducted-by-aliens route as we’ve seen with Jaxon Smith-Njigba this past season and Nick Bosa in 2018. We here at Buckeye Talk don’t like to theorize injuries with players so we refer to it as such. He can’t be awesome if he isn’t on the field.
The other is just that he simply regresses or the hype and expectation is so high that he can never really live up to the idea of him, making it virtually impossible to ever impress anyone. Heisman Trophy winners who then come back for another year often deal with this problem as USC quarterback Caleb Williams will deal with it this season.
Likelihood: 5%.
Likelihood of in between: 60%
Predicted comparison
The last four wide receivers who were this awesome as sophomores and had a chance to encore it were Smith-Njiga and Jordan Addison at Pittsburgh in 2021, LSU’s Ja’Marr Chase in 2019 and Alabama’s Jerry Jeudy in 2018.
Smith-Njigba played 60 snaps the following year and Addison transferred to USC to play with Williams and was OK while also dealing with injuries.
Chase sat out because of COVID-19, but if we’re honest that was probably the best decision because he was still a top-10 pick and quickly established himself as one of the NFL’s best receivers. Everything else that made LSU elite in 2019 walked out the door after that season, so the Tigers probably weren’t equipped to help Chase put his best foot forward in 2020 even if things had been normal and he played.
Jeudy’s junior year probably comes the closest to Harrison’s situation this season because he returned to a loaded Alabama team where even though he was the best option, he wasn’t the only option. That 2019 Alabama team’s starting and backup quarterback went on to be first-rounders along with its starting running back (Najee Harris), tackles (Alex Leatherwood and Evan Neal) and top four wide receivers (Jeudy, Smith, Henry Ruggs and Jaylen Waddle), with one of them eventually winning the Heisman.
OSU has a potential first-round quarterback (Kylee McCord, Devin Brown or both), running back (TreVeyon Henderson), left guard (Donovan Jackson) and the nation’s best wide receiving corps in Harrison, Emeka Egbuka, Julian Fleming and Johnson, plus a bunch of guys behind them that may be on the same path.
With that being said, none of these guys have what Harrison had, making him best-positioned to actually build on what his first year of meaningful snaps looked like. There are those who’ve walked in his shoes before. It just won’t be shocking when he walks farther in them than they ever did.
That’s because unlike those other guys, when the eventual problems do show their face, we’ll all be silently chanting, “Marv can fix that.”
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