Monday night at Trey Sermon in Miami did not go as planned.
The last running back of the state of Ohio suffered an apparent upper body injury in the first race of the national championship game against Alabama, which led him to go to the visiting locker room and subsequently demand a trip to a local hospital. However, he seems to have avoided anything important.
Sermon is “doing well” and will be traveling back to Columbus on Tuesday after the 52-24 loss, a team spokesman said that morning. Her mother, Natoshia Mitchell, told the Columbus Dispatch that her injury “is not serious”, although she and the football program refused to share the details. After the game, coach Ryan Day said the tail was sore and “it certainly hurt.”
The end of the Sermon season came almost as abruptly as his rise at the end of the season.
He was, it could be argued, the most important player in the Ohio State squad, not named Justin Fields. After a pedestrian in the first four games as Buckeye after an Oklahoma transfer, he ran for more than 100 yards in three consecutive matches. Sermon scored 112 yards in the state of Michigan, broke the race mark for a single game of the program with 331 yards against Northwestern in the Big Ten title game, and then carried the ball 193 yards into the Sugar Bowl. Along with Fields, he became one of his team’s main offensive weapons in the final stretch.
In place of Sermon on Monday, Master Teague managed 15 runs for 65 yards and two touchdowns, while Marcus Crowley played his first offensive snaps of the season to register six rushes for 14 yards. The sermon night ended after a two-meter run.
Sermon, a fourth-year veteran, must leave the state of Ohio for the NFL’s 2021 Draft instead of using the NCAA’s permitted fifth season of eligibility.