Sports Today: Football recruiting, Saturday playoff games and playoff division changes

There have been a couple of big stories related to Ohio State football this week.

One comes from an alumnus as Malcolm Jenkins' reaction to the fallout from the Eagles' White House "disinvitation" went viral.

We already covered that yesterday and the day before.

As far as the future of the program, Ohio State is still looking for its next quarterback commit after top target Grant Gunnell verbally committed to Arizona.

Gunnell is a pro-style quarterback from Texas who was thought to be an OSU lean before deciding to head west.

According to Land of Ten's Ryan Donnelly, Urban Meyer and his coaches might have to reset their board at this point.

Among the players Donnelly suggests Buckeye fans keep an eye on is Connor Bazelak.

The Alter quarterback already has an impressive offer list that includes Georgia, Iowa and Pittsburgh.

The Buckeyes have shown considerable interest, but they haven’t offered yet.

Will that change during summer camp season?

Stay tuned…

There’s a change coming to the high school football playoffs this fall, but the result will be familiar. 

Saturday night playoff games are coming back after a one-year hiatus.

My first reaction was they seem to have pulled the trigger rather quickly here, but maybe they are wise to be proactive.

That’s really interesting.

I like the option of seeing more than one game a weekend, and it’s great for media organizations because we can cover more games, but I thought there was some merit to staying away from Saturdays since more and more college football games are being played in prime time.

This is probably a win for hard-core fans as opposed to casual fans.

One year does not a trend make, but preliminary numbers would seem to suggest the group of fans who would rather watch two games a weekend is larger than those who could be classified as casual fans.

The latter are valuable for maximizing ticket sales, but they also might be the most likely to stay home if they find something they have just as much interest in on TV, so pursuing them can be a fool’s errand…

Speaking of the playoffs, did your favorite team change division? 

The new ones were formally announced this week.

Locally there were no changes in Division VII or VI (where Marion Local and Coldwater will continue to share a region).

Division IV and I remained the same as well.

In Division V, Anna, Brookville, Greenon, Miami East, Milton-Union and Versailles are all moving to Region 18 from 20.

The biggest difference can be found in Division III, where the competitive balance initiative moved Fenwick up to D-3, Region 12.

They will be joined there by Carroll as the Patriots dropped down from Division II.

Spoiler: Neither of them will probably like it there very much.

This region was already loaded as it is not only the home of state champion Trotwood-Madison but also Alter, Chaminade Julienne and Dunbar.

Bellbrook and Wilmington also find themselves in a new region. They’ll share Region 11 with a group of teams mostly from central and southeast Ohio.