Jeremiah Smith can’t put up 217 yards and four touchdowns every week, and Ohio State shouldn’t need him to.
Through four games, the junior has 33 catches for 617 yards and seven touchdowns. The four receivers competing to be his running mate, seniors Devin McCuin and Brandon Inniss and true freshmen Chris Henry Jr. and Brock Boyd, have 30 catches, 513 yards and four touchdowns combined.
We’ve already seen what that imbalance costs.
At Texas, the Buckeyes led 23-3 entering the fourth quarter and lost
24-23. Smith had 110 yards at halftime and then no catches over the final 24:40, and the only other wideouts to catch a pass all night were Inniss (one for 19 yards) and McCuin (one for five).
Texas took away JJ in the second half of that game, and nobody made the Longhorns pay. Every defensive coordinator left on the schedule has that tape.
The freshmen are already the better bet
The answer at WR2 is Chris Henry Jr or Brock Boyd in my opinion, not the seniors.
The per snap numbers are closer than you’d think. The seniors have 298 yards on 235 snaps, the freshmen 215 on 192. The freshmen average 23.9 yards per catch to the seniors’ 14.2, and that’s with 49 of Inniss’s yards coming on a Hail Mary.
The freshmen aren’t failing to produce, they’re just not being asked to.
Henry is the talent Ohio State recruits to replace a star, not complement one. The consensus No. 1 receiver in the 2026 class, the 6-foot-5, 211-pound son of the late Bengals receiver Chris Henry set Withrow’s school record with 1,127 yards as a sophomore, then caught 28 passes for 607 yards and six scores in eight senior games at Mater Dei, including 213 yards against No. 1 St. John Bosco.
Ryan Day says his size and frame looks a lot like Jeremiah’s. And two of his three college catches (15 yards against Ball State, 75 against Kent State) have gone for touchdowns.
Boyd is the one nobody saw coming. A three-star who flipped from TCU, he was the 25th highest-rated of Ohio State’s 29 high school signees. He also broke a 20 year old Southlake Carroll receiving record, lost his black stripe after just six spring practices (third-fastest for a freshman since 2012, behind only Smith and Carnell Tate) and has six catches for 110 yards already.
Day praised his football IQ and short-area quickness, and WRs coach Cortez Hankton said Boyd sees the game like an upperclassman.
The seniors deserve respect, not a monopoly.
Inniss, a 2023 five-star who wears the Block O jersey, totaled 51 catches for 505 yards in his first three seasons and averaged 7.5 yards per catch as a starter in 2025. McCuin, a UTSA transfer with 1,696 career yards there, opened with six catches for 97 yards against Ball State but has seven catches for 68 yards in three games since.
They’re a reliable floor, but the freshmen are the ceiling.
It’s time to ramp them up
The window is now. Ohio State (No. 5) at 3-1, visits (No. 14) Iowa on Saturday and hosts Maryland on Oct. 10. Then they go to (No. 6) Indiana on Oct. 17, and after the bye play at (No. 18) USC on Oct. 31 and host (No. 15) Oregon on Nov. 7 before playing Michigan on Nov. 28.
Mistakes in early October are cheap, but mistakes in Bloomington, California or against the Wolverines are not.
Day has already said Henry and Boyd will be “major contributors” in Big Ten play. The next step is the football. Henry should be getting almost half the snaps as the outside receiver opposite Smith, because a 6-5 target on the other side makes bracketing Smith very dangerous. Boyd belongs in the slot on third downs, where his route detail matters most. Inniss can own punt returns and spot snaps, and McCuin stays the dependable veteran in the rotation.
This is also on the quarterback. After halftime at Texas, Sayin went 5 of 16 as key throws to a blanketed Smith fell incomplete. He has since answered Ryan Day’s challenge.
As I broke down in Julian Sayin vs. Illinois’ secondary decided the game, he completed 27 of 36 passes for 367 yards and four touchdowns with no interceptions, while Ohio State went 8-of-12 on third down and 4-for-4 in the red zone.
That’s the Sayin who can make this offense work, but every one of those touchdown passes still went to the same receiver. The next step is building that same timing with Henry and Boyd before Indiana and Oregon force him to look elsewhere.
There’s a longer view too. Smith is draft-eligible after this season, and I don’t think there’s much debate about what he’s going to do.
Inniss and McCuin are seniors in their fourth college seasons. Next year’s receiver room almost certainly belongs to Henry and Boyd, and every rep they take now, with a Heisman favorite drawing coverage, is one they won’t have to learn on the fly in 2027.
Other guys will have to produce eventually, and in my opinion the two best candidates are the freshman, Brock Boyd and Chris Henry Jr.
