'Captain Buckeye' Jack Sawyer, Ohio State's senior leader, embraces full-circle moment

ARLINGTON, Texas — A fair distance away from the stage where confetti would soon flurry, where Ohio State head coach Ryan Day would hoist the Cotton Bowl trophy and quarterback Will Howard and edge rusher Jack Sawyer would be named MVPs on their respective sides of the ball, a communications representative for the Buckeyes squeezed a football in the crook of his arm around the 9-yard line. He'd been holding it for quite some time, since at least the moment when the final buzzer sounded but perhaps a while longer, around the 2:13 mark of the fourth quarter, when Sawyer stripped it away from Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers and galloped 83 yards down the sideline for an unforgettable scoop-and-score that propelled his team to the national championship game. There was an instant between those two snapshots when Sawyer, a revered senior and team captain, entrusted the memento to Jerry Emig, the program's longtime sports information director, with very specific instructions.

"Jack gave it to me," Emig recalled, "and he said, ‘Jerry, this is the ball I scored with. Hold onto it. Don't give it away."

So Emig hawked the ball through an on-field celebration that stretched from one side of AT&T Stadium to the other, from the formal presentation near the same end zone where Sawyer solidified a 28-14 win over Texas to the playing of "Carmen Ohio" by the Buckeyes' marching band a few yards from the location of Ewers' crippling fumble. Emig was still cradling that ball more than 20 minutes later, when Ohio State's locker room opened to the media, and he repeated its origin story a time or two more. Whether it eventually ends up back with Sawyer, who will play the final game of his collegiate career against Notre Dame at Mercedes-Benz