New Ohio State offensive lineman Seth McLaughlin ready to put snapping issues behind him

COLUMBUS, Ohio — After Seth McLaughlin’s last time on a football field, he became the subject of nationwide criticism.

McLaughlin struggled repeatedly with low snaps to Alabama quarterback Jalen Milroe in the College Football Playoff semifinal against Michigan, sometimes essentially ending a play as it began. The Crimson Tide lost in overtime after being stopped on a fourth down play that featured, again, a low snap.

That was on Jan. 1.

Just a few days later, he was in Columbus for a visit after entering the transfer portal. And five days after the game, he was committed to Ohio State. Life changed quickly for the born-and-raised southerner.

And now, he’s ready to put his bad snaps behind him.

“There’s a lot that goes into it,” McLaughlin said Tuesday in his first media availability as a Buckeye. “Once you have a bad one, you kind of start thinking about, ‘OK, I got to get this right.’ I don’t think I was really struggling from a mental standpoint, it was just a matter of, it would just happen. I can’t really explain what was going on and what went into it. That’s really in the past. I’m looking to moving forward from that.”

When recruited by Ryan Day and Justin Frye, McLaughlin said that there’s indeed a plan to fix those snaps over the next few months.

In order to do that, though, he’ll have to get back into a rhythm that he’s been in for nearly his entire life. He said that he’s been snapping since he was seven years old, and that it was a bit like shooting free throws.

“When you go through something like that, you have to sit down and look at yourself and be like, ‘OK, who am I as a person? What am I?’” McLaughlin said. “I just kind of sat down and said, ‘OK, where can I go from here? I can’t control the past. I can’t control what happened in that game, I can’t control the public reaction to that. But I’m here now. I’m in a great place to continue my development, play for an incredible program and play for incredible coaches. Really, I’m very positive. I have no negative feelings about what happened. It is what it is, type of thing.”

And while the plan is for him to fix the snapping problems, which plagued him all season long, he was recruited to Ohio State as an offensive lineman, not specifically a center. He’s played tackle (in high school) and has reps at guard, but is comfortable playing wherever he’s asked.

The blowback on McLaughlin was fierce, as the entire college football world saw his issues present themselves at the worst possible time.

But now, in Columbus, he’s ready to put that behind him.

“It doesn’t really affect you,” McLaughlin said of social media commentary. “That’s kind of the thing about social media, I’ve heard that if somebody pats your back, you can’t listen to them. If somebody’s knocking you down, you can’t listen to them. At the end of the day, nobody out there really knows exactly what goes into it unless they’ve been in the position.”