Ohio State football Skull Session before Rutgers game: Lorenzo Styles
Ohio State football defensive back Lorenzo Styles speaks at Skull Session before Rutgers game.
Like the Great Awakenings of years gone by, a religious revival is emanating from Ohio State’s campus.
The mouthpieces of revival aren’t buttoned-up pastors yelling about fire and brimstone. And they aren’t speaking under tents or at church pulpits.
They are Ohio State football players. Often, their platform is on the field and on social media. And it stays the same, even when they falter on the field, as they did in the College Football Playoff. Their message?
“JESUS WON.”
Mass baptisms spark ‘Buckeye Revival’
The “Buckeye Revival” caught fire on a warm August night in 2024 as hundreds gathered to listen to Ohio State football players TreyVeyon Henderson, Emeka Egbuka and Gee Scott Jr. share their Christian faith.
Judson Overmyer, a northwest Ohio native, made the last-minute decision to drive to Columbus for the event.
He heard Scott, a senior tight end, read the story of the Prodigal Son aloud to the crowd. The Luke 15 parable describes the story of the child of a wealthy man who squanders his inheritance and doesn’t feel worthy to return home.
The son is then welcomed home with open arms.
“He got towards the end, and they started the altar call and it kind of went silent,” Overmyer said. “And then he said, ‘It only takes one.'”
Overmyer doesn’t remember being the first to stand up and walk to the front of the crowd. But that’s what he did, and when he turned around, he saw dozens of people walking up behind him.
Then he was baptized.
“It was the most surreal feeling. The second I hit the water and came back up, I felt weightless. Like the feeling of all the burdens on me that felt like they were physically weighing me down were taken away in that just outward profession of my faith,” he said.
Buckeyes build ‘Jesus hype’
Led by Henderson, Scott, Egbuka, J.T. Tuimoloau and Kamryn Babb, among others, the football team’s spiritual movement became defined by the players sporting T-Shirt bearing the words “JESUS WON,” holding a moment of prayer before each game and voicing outspoken declarations of faith in media interviews and on social media.
“What has taken place in my life and the lives of other people on this team — and I know I’m here to talk about football — but it’s a true testament of the Lord that I serve,” Scott told reporters during a January 2025 press conference.
Through the team’s 2024 national championship run, its march through the 2025 regular season and the first victory against Michigan since 2019, the players created what one Columbus faith leader called “Jesus hype.”
Nick Nye, the executive director of For Columbus, said he heard from a friend on staff at 614 Church that a congregant’s roommate started coming to church out of curiosity driven by the players’ faith.
“When my pastor friend, David, shared this story, he said it in a sense of, ‘Man, I just feel like I’ve heard stories like this happening several times,'” Nye said. “It’s been more than once.”
Even before the movement came into the public eye at the 2024 fall kickoff, the Buckeye Revival was catching fire behind the scenes: off the screens and off the field.
Months prior to Overmyer starting the altar call and being baptized, Scott baptized his teammates, the men who would later lead the movement, in front of his religious home, Gahanna’s One Church.
The reach of the ‘Buckeye Revival’
The revival that has taken over the Ohio State University campus has spread beyond the stadium, the Ohio Union and the Oval.
And it extended beyond the 2024 season and into the 2025 squad.
On Sept. 8, 2025, a panel of Buckeyes told their stories of faith and football for a crowd of nearly 2,000 people. A social media account that shares testimonies from the team’s Christian players said around 75 people were baptized that night.
“Jesus won. I’m good; I’m great. I can lose this game, and I’m still great. I still won. I think that was the biggest thing for me last year. I lost so much anxiety as the season went on. I started playing with peace, started playing for the Lord and just playing anxiety-free,” Styles said at the event, according to a video shared by The Courageous Athlete account.
Social media platforms (not to mention their visibility during nationally televised games) have helped the football-players-turned-evangelists extend their reach.
At the forefront of the movement is a digital platform, The Walk Foundation, led by podcaster and Christian content creator, Kevin Walsh.
Using his personal platform of sports content and Christian ministry, Walsh and his co-host, Jacob Byrd, began interviewing Buckeyes about their faith journeys on the series, “Buckeye Revival,” after the success of the 2024 fall kickoff.
The Walk Foundation, or “accessthewalk,” had more than 54,000 followers on TikTok and 43,000 followers on Instagram as of mid-December.
Clips from his interviews with Scott and Montgomery have 1.8 million and 3.2 million views on Instagram alone, with videos consistently reaching hundreds of thousands of views.
Walsh said the celebrity of the athletes helps spread the Christian message.
“Athletes are idolized so much that it actually points people to what these athletes really care about and where they’re rooted, which is in their faith in Jesus,” Walsh said.
Changing the next generation of athletes
Walsh has been most surprised by the depth of faith of the athletes.
“Football players or athletes get a little bit of a stereotype that they just hit heads on the field and may not be so down to earth or so vulnerable. You look at these guys and they’d be big, masculine, angry guys, but then you see how soft their hearts are,” Walsh said.
The vulnerability is likewise reaching younger generations, both on and off the field.
Like the Buckeyes, a group of players from Bishop Watterson High School pray before they take the field.
Nye recounted a player’s father pointing to the Ohio State athletes’ faith influence as the high school team took home the state title for the second year in a row on Dec. 5.
He said when pastors are intentional about reaching Generation Z or college-aged students, they are seeing upticks in attendance.
“Gen Z and Gen Alpha are now more likely to attend church more regularly than even the boomer generation, and are more interested in Christianity than Gen X, Boomers and Millennials,” he said. “It’s kind of creating this wave, and I think the football players are just the spotlighted version of that.”
Opponents-turned-brothers in faith
Walsh and Byrd now are interviewing athletes from universities around the country with The Walk Podcast’s College Football Series.
They have talked with athletes from Alabama, LSU, Notre Dame and even Michigan. But Walsh said it all started with the Ohio State football team.
“[The other athletes] saw these Ohio State football players sharing about their faith, and they’re like, ‘Wait, we can do that, too,'” Walsh said.
“The catalyst has been here in Columbus. That’s what’s been really cool. From there, it’s actually spreading out, and other athletes are just being encouraged by these Ohio State guys. Then they can build it up and feel confident doing that in their own communities.”
After Ohio State beat Penn State, Montgomery and injured Penn State quarterback Drew Allar prayed together on the field.
“JESUS WON, for both teams,” The Courageous Athlete posted following the game.
In an interview with Michael Taaffe, a Texas Longhorns defensive back, Byrd asked about challenges in Taaffe’s faith and football career.
“You miss a play in front of 10 million fans, and you’re getting humiliated on all social media platforms. It’s like, ‘Why is this happening. This is not what I asked for,” Taaffe said on the Nov. 25 podcast episode.
“. . . I always get reminded that I can’t do this alone. I think the pressure that we get put in as college athletes, the adversity I’ve had to face in my life, nobody can do it alone.”
Walsh said through gaining a peek behind the curtain of the athletes’ lives while leading the storytelling series, he learned that the athletes are “normal people.”
“These are normal guys just like me. They go through the same struggles that I might go through,” Walsh said. “The impact is, ‘I’m not alone.’ And athletes who you might think are on cloud nine, they’re so similar.”
Finding victory in loss: What happens next?
The Buckeyes’ lost twice in the 2024 season: an early conference season road game against Oregon, and a regular season-ending heartbreaker against archrival Michigan.
The 2025 season looked different, as the Buckeyes took down Texas in the season opener and cruised through Big Ten play, defeating Michigan in Ann Arbor on Nov. 29 for the first time since 2019.
Then came the Big Ten championship game. The No. 1 Buckeyes, favorites to win the conference title, fell 13-10 to the Indiana Hoosiers, in a game with eerie similarities to last year’s Michigan loss.
While they entered the College Football Playoff as a No. 2 seed with aspirations for a national championship repeat, the loss to Miami was a big blow to a team considered the country’s best for much of the year.
Still, in the wake of the loss, the Courageous Athlete Instagram page shared a simple message:
“JESUS WON.”
Kindness and religion reporter Sophia Veneziano may be reached at sveneziano@dispatch.com.