Looking Ahead to Texas: What Matt Patricia’s Defense Must Solve Against Arch Manning

Ohio State’s season opener answered one question. This week’s trip to Austin asks a much harder one. Can Matt Patricia’s defense do to a fully healthy, top-tier Texas offense what it just did to Ball State, and can it do it on the road, at night, in a series that has quietly become one of the most heated in college football?

The Buckeyes and Longhorns are meeting for the third time in under 20 months. Ohio State beat Texas 28-14 in the Cotton Bowl to punch its ticket to the 2024-season national championship game, then beat the Longhorns again, 14-7, in the 2025 season opener at Ohio Stadium. Both wins leaned heavily on Buckeye defense. Saturday’s game, set for 7:30 p.m. ET at Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium, is Texas’s chance to finally turn the tide, and Ohio State’s chance to prove last year wasn’t a fluke.

Arch Manning Is a Different Problem Now

Standing in the way is Arch Manning, no longer the unproven name he was during that first meeting. Manning threw for 3,163 yards and 26 touchdowns for Texas in 2025, and he opened this season by completing 20 of 27 passes for 305 yards and four touchdowns. He has real weapons around him, too. Auburn transfer Cam Coleman caught three passes for 70 yards and two scores in Texas’s opener, and Ryan Wingo, entering his third year in Austin, added seven catches for 120 yards and a touchdown of his own. This isn’t the Texas offense Matt Patricia’s defense saw a year ago.

The clearest concern for Ohio State’s defense is generating pressure without over-committing bodies to the blitz. Kenyatta Jackson Jr., the fifth-year defensive end who racked up 6.5 sacks last season, didn’t record one against Ball State, and that’s likely by design as much as circumstance. Teams are going to slide protection Jackson’s way all season, which means defensive ends like Zion Grady, Beau Atkinson and true freshman Khary Wilder need to win one-on-one matchups for Ohio State’s four-man rush to hold up against a quarterback who extends plays as well as Manning does.

That’s where the version of Patricia’s defense Ohio State didn’t show against Ball State becomes relevant. Multiple reports out of the Ball State week indicated Patricia deliberately withheld certain defensive fronts and blitz packages, saving them for Texas. It tracks with everything Matt Patricia has said about his defensive philosophy since arriving in Columbus: multiplicity that changes week to week based on the opponent, not a static system that reveals its full hand in Week 1.

On the other side of the ball, Texas is breaking in its own new defensive coordinator in Will Muschamp, who returns to Austin after previously running the Longhorns’ defense from 2008 to 2010. Muschamp’s group forced three turnovers and recorded two sacks in Texas’s opener, evidence that head coach Steve Sarkisian is comfortable handing over full control of that side of the ball to his new coordinator. Sarkisian isn’t taking the challenge lightly, either. “Ohio State, they’re No. 1 in the country for a reason,” he said this week, adding of Jeremiah Smith specifically, “We better know where No. 4 is on every snap.”

Patricia has been here before, in a sense. A year ago, ahead of Ohio State hosting this same Texas team in the corresponding meeting at Ohio Stadium, he leaned on Buckeye Nation to set the tone before the game ever started. “I’m excited for the fans. I need the fans to be loud. Let’s get after the quarterback. Let’s make it hard on him,” Patricia told Big Ten Network at the time. This time it’s Ohio State walking into someone else’s hostile environment, without that same crowd noise working in its favor.

The Stakes Behind Saturday’s Rematch

There’s also a broader stakes layer to Saturday’s rematch. Ohio State finished the 2025 regular season unbeaten before losing the Big Ten Championship to Indiana, 13-10, then falling to Miami in the Cotton Bowl quarterfinal despite the No. 2 seed, a disappointing finish for a team that spent most of the year ranked No. 1 in the country. Texas, by contrast, missed the Playoff entirely despite opening 2025 ranked No. 1, a disappointing finish of its own that has left this season carrying extra weight for a Longhorns program looking to prove last year was the outlier rather than the standard.

For Matt Patricia and Ohio State, none of the history matters if the defense doesn’t handle Manning’s mobility and get home against one of the more talented receiver duos it will see all season. But the Buckeyes have already beaten this version of Texas twice, and both times it was the defense that made the difference.