COLUMBUS, Ohio — Seth McLaughlin is seated on a bench on the sideline at the Ohio State indoor practice facility when he sighs. He needs a moment.
Tears well in his eyes as he talks about the last 10 months and everything that’s entailed: The snapping issues at Alabama that came to the forefront on national television on Jan. 1. His transfer just a few days after the disastrous Rose Bowl against Michigan. Leaving Tuscaloosa for good and making Ohio State the one and only visit he took while in the transfer portal. Joining a team with national title aspirations — then playing like one of the best centers in college football.
McLaughlin is reflecting just three days before Ohio State is set to play Northwestern. He’s putting the finishing touches on a season where he was named a finalist for the Outland Trophy, an award for the nation’s top interior lineman. A full-circle matchup with Michigan is almost two weeks away.
The way McLaughlin ended up at Ohio State wasn’t as he’d envisioned. But in that moment in time, all was right.
“I mean, this year has been — it’s been the happiest I’ve been in my life,” McLaughlin told Cleveland.com on Nov. 13. “I came here on the lowest of lows, and this city has really just lifted me up just day in and day out. My parents moved up here for the season. I’m living with my girlfriend and we’ve got a cute little golden retriever puppy named Rosie. And just coming home to them every night after a good solid day at work with all my best friends, I’m just really grateful.”
On Nov. 19, three days after the Northwestern game, McLaughlin tore his left Achilles in a non-contact injury during practice. His season ended unexpectedly in heartbreaking fashion.
Ohio State’s season moved on absent McLaughlin, as the Buckeyes beat Indiana, paving the way for a showdown with Michigan to end the regular season with Big Ten Championship Game appearance is on the line.
It will be a moment that McLaughlin had fought to be part of, and one he’d worked tirelessly to get to.
Instead, McLaughlin will be watching it wearing a walking boot, cheering on his teammates from the sideline at Ohio Stadium. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this for him, but nothing over the last year has.
‘What the hell happened?’
Just two days after Alabama’s overtime loss to Michigan in the Rose Bowl, McLaughlin drove home to Buford, Georgia.
He and the other draft-eligible players at Alabama had met with coach Nick Saban after the Rose Bowl to discuss their future plans, and McLaughlin remained undecided.
He’d heard prior to the year that if he had a really good season, he could raise his draft stock to a fourth or fifth-round draft pick in the 2024 NFL Draft. By the time he met with Saban, he was told that he’d be a seventh round choice — if he was lucky — but that he would likely go undrafted. Saban wanted McLaughlin to return to Alabama for another season.
But McLaughlin felt he’d “stagnated” at Alabama and needed a change of scenery, a choice he says Saban understood. Declaring for the NFL Draft at that time wasn’t out of the question when McLaughlin began the car ride back.
He entered the transfer portal on Jan. 3.
A bevy of phone calls (McLaughlin estimated 50-to-100) were waiting for him. Head coaches, position coaches and coordinators — some from the same program — all reached out to him, he said, to try and schedule a visit and gauge his interest. He says he picked up the phone for about 30-to-40 of those coaches.
The phone calls for McLaughlin were a nice reminder, considering what had happened just two days earlier.
Snapping issues throughout the Rose Bowl — and at earlier points of the season — plagued McLaughlin and quarterback Jalen Milroe, and were part of the reason why the Crimson Tide lost in overtime that night, ending their season in the College Football Playoff semifinals.
“I mean after that game, everybody was like, ‘Oh, he is the worst center in the country. He sucks. This guy’s going to be selling insurance next year. Nobody’s going to want him,’” McLaughlin recalled. “Hearing all these schools call and be like, ‘OK, (we) still want you to play football,’ was nice to hear.”
The ensuing few days were hard for McLaughlin, who underwent a wave of criticism on social media that extended beyond the bounds of normal social media interactions. He said the jokes and memes sometimes made him laugh, sure, but they were part of the growth process for him to get back to the level he knew he could get to.
“I gave my all to the University of Alabama,” McLaughlin said. “My performance wasn’t a reflection of how hard I worked to do well that season. I wanted to make the fans happy. I have two degrees from there, I put in a lot of work, and just for the school to not come out on top and have people blame you for all sorts of things, and get your address leaked, it’s never what you wanted. That was my worst nightmare, and it came true after that. So leaving there was really hard. That’s what I wanted to do since I was growing up — was play for Alabama, play for coach Saban, make him proud. So having to leave that, and forge my legacy on my own, if you would’ve told me last year, at the beginning of the last season, that I would be (at Ohio State) playing? I’m like, ‘What the hell went wrong? What the hell happened?’”
Ohio State offensive line coach Justin Frye was one of the first coaches to call McLaughlin once he entered the portal. And still, it took convincing for him not to make the NFL leap to try to make a team as an undrafted free agent.
He eventually came around to the idea of another season of college football, arriving in Columbus on Jan. 4 for his visit. His commitment was announced on Jan. 6.
“And I’m very, very thankful that he convinced me to do so,” McLaughlin said. “Being from the south, I didn’t really think about coming up here out of high school, but it was a great spot to land after playing football and having appreciation for all the great teams in college football. It just was a perfect, perfect place.”
He signed the lease for his apartment on Jan. 8. And less than 10 days after the game against Michigan in California, McLaughlin was participating in offseason workouts with Ohio State.
‘I was just getting my butt whooped’
The learning curve for McLaughlin from Alabama to Ohio State was steep.
The training philosophy he was used to in Tuscaloosa is different than the one in Columbus and it took some time to adjust to. The early going, he said, was rough.
“We do a bunch of competitions in the weight room during that spring, I was just getting my butt whooped in all the competitions by everybody, like even the younger guys were way ahead of me in some of the grip strength stuff,” McLaughlin said. “So I was talking to one of the guys and he was laughing, he was like, ‘Dude, when you first got here and you weren’t beating anybody in the competitions, I was like, ‘Why did we go get this guy?’”
McLaughlin had a lot to overcome, notably the snapping issues, which Ohio State coach Ryan Day attributed to a cadence problem at Alabama. But he also needed to prove he belonged, considering he was joining a team that already had a returning center in Carson Hinzman, who had started 12 games at center for the Buckeyes in 2023.
Once actual football started and he adjusted in the weight room, he began to make his impression.
“I think once we got on the field and people could see me as a football player, and once I start sharing my knowledge, people are like, ‘OK, yeah, this guy knows what he’s doing,’” McLaughlin said.
It was a tricky line to toe, because while McLaughlin had College Football Playoff experience, and had played more snaps than almost everyone in Ohio State’s offensive line room, he was still new to the roster.
“If you come in here and you start demanding respect, people aren’t going to give it to you,” McLaughlin said. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done in the past, if you haven’t earned somebody’s respect, they’re not going to give it to you. So you have to do things day in, day out to be consistently a voice where people can go and trust.”
Over the next few months, players began to do just that.
Across the roster, various teammates praised his knowledge of the game first and foremost, but were sure to note just how good he was on the field, too.
“Seth is really great at being relaxed in certain situations, but also playing incredibly physical,” Hinzman said on Nov. 13. “The way he’s brought the physicality to the O-line has been immense. His mindset and his knowledge of football in general has been huge.”
Not only did it make an impact on the offensive side of the ball, defenders took notice.
“He’s a vet, he’s been doing it for a long time,” defensive tackle Kayden McDonald said in early November. “He went against the best d-linemen, he was in the SEC and came up here. That’s the best. He’s the best center in the country.”
Describing McLaughlin in such a way would’ve been a stretch back in January. By November, it was looking more and more like it could be a reality.
“He’s NFL-ready,” defensive tackle Ty Hamilton added. “Being able to go out there and do the things that he does on a day in, day out basis, a lot of centers can’t do that.”
McLaughlin credited Frye for furthering his development, noting how knowledgable he is about various techniques, and how he’s helped him grow as a lineman.
“I think when a coach takes a guy out of the portal, he better not miss with who he’s bringing in because that’s an older guy,” McLaughlin said. “You don’t want to bring in a guy that’s not a culture fit, that could hurt the younger guys in the room, that’ll mesh with all that. He took a risk to bring me in here, and when somebody takes a risk, they’re going to be heavily invested in your development. When you’re at a place like Bama, everybody’s super, super talented. So a lot of the coaching is coaching them what to do instead of how to do it. And I feel like after being somewhere and you’re established, you might not get as coached technically about a lot of stuff. But here it’s been so much technical work that it’s been really good for my development.”
McLaughlin was at the forefront of a front five that was named a semifinalist for the Joe Moore Award, given to the nation’s top offensive line. He certainly was a large reason why.
In his 10-game Ohio State career, per Pro Football Focus, McLaughlin allowed zero sacks, seven pressures and was flagged just once in 565 snaps.
Ohio State center Seth McLaughlin was playing as one of the best interior linemen in the country.Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
A season-ending injury
The news about McLaughlin’s left Achilles slowly trickled out as a rumor before a report from The Columbus Dispatch confirmed the devastating news that Ohio State’s starting center was out for the year.
“Crushed for Seth and our team,” Day said, one day after McLaughlin’s injury. “Once that wears off, you’ve got to move on. It’s the next-man-up mentality.”
McLaughlin was seen on a scooter at the practice facility the next day after practice as the team left the field, his right leg pushing him back to the locker room as interviews happened around him.
“It sucks what happens,” offensive lineman Donovan Jackson said that night. “Especially a man of (McLaughlin’s) caliber, a player of that caliber.”
Off the field, things were going as good as they could’ve been for him. He’d begun selling hats entitled, “Run The Damn Ball,” where 100% of the proceeds went directly to the Mid-Ohio Food Collective.
He’d already earned two degrees from Alabama, one in finance and the other in sports hospitality management. His undergraduate GPA was 4.0, while his graduate GPA was a 3.6 — while he notes, “I could’ve done better.” He is working on a third now at Ohio State, in human development and family science.
The goal was, and still is, for him to make it to the NFL. But Achilles tears take significant time to heal, sometimes taking up to a year for an athlete to fully recover.
Things were once again back to uncertainty.
In terms of McLaughlin’s place on the field, Ohio State also faced uncertainty.
The Buckeyes turned to Hinzman, again, to be the team’s center. It required another reconfiguration of the line as Austin Siereveld went to left guard, moving Hinzman from the spot he’d started three straight games at, next to McLaughlin.
But to say there was a one-for-one replacement for McLaughlin would be shortsighted. The Buckeyes lost one of the best interior offensive linemen in the nation, someone who was just a few weeks away from a true full-circle moment. It was a bitter ending to a season that no one saw coming.
Michigan
Just a few days after McLaughlin’s injury, Ohio State hosted then-No. 5 Indiana.
As the Buckeyes lined up in the tunnel to come onto the field for pregame warmups, the crowd at Ohio Stadium stood and cheered as the team ran onto the field. And a few seconds after the team had cleared out of the tunnel and began their pregame routine, McLaughlin came down the tunnel on his scooter, wearing his scarlet No. 56 jersey and a beanie.
When the crowd near the corner of the end zone saw him, they roared their approval. McLaughlin couldn’t help but smile.
The new norm for him the rest of the season will be just that: Watching his teammates from the sideline. And this Saturday might be the toughest moment for him to be in that role.
That’s because he’s well aware of how big the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry is. It didn’t take him long to figure out.
“I grew up in the south and I always thought Alabama-Auburn was the biggest,” McLaughlin said. “Alabama-Tennessee, Georgia-Auburn, you hear all these rivalries and being in Alabama playing in the Iron Bowl, we really only talked about it one week out of the year. So I get here and every single day we do a rep of abs to how many days until The Game. So after a couple days of just my core on fire, I was like, ‘What the hell is going on?’”
He took it upon himself to research the history of the two schools, educating himself on what The Game means to both fanbases.
“The Iron Bowl meant a lot for the people in Alabama, but it wasn’t really emphasized in the building like it is here,” McLaughlin said in mid-November. “It’s been very hard, all those reps of abs, but it’ll be fun to play in that game and see how The Shoe is rocking.”
Of course, that possibility is no longer an option.
He’s certainly still be a factor with the team: Quarterback Will Howard wore McLaughlin’s hat at his postgame press conference following the Indiana game, and Day cracked that he’ll be a fixture on the sideline for the rest of the season operating as a quasi-coach.
Almost three weeks before the Michigan game, he was seated on a bench at the practice facility, emotional, describing how much his transfer to Ohio State had meant to him and his family. He was brought to Columbus, after his old team’s loss to Michigan and his own individual struggles, to help the Buckeyes end a three-game losing streak against the Wolverines.
He’s still going to try and help Ohio State do just that. But on Saturday, he’ll have to do it from the bench at Ohio Stadium.
