100 Days, 100 Reasons G6 Football Matters

On August 31, 2013, Buffalo opened its season at No. 2 Ohio State. The Buckeyes were riding a 12-game winning streak. 103,980 people filled Ohio Stadium. The Bulls were 34½-point underdogs.

Buffalo fell behind 23-0 in the first quarter.

“At that point, you wondered if coach Urban Meyer’s studs might drop 80 points on the Bulls, sending them skulking home to Buffalo with their pride wounded and their fans wondering if all the talk of contending for a MAC championship and a bowl berth was a bunch of hype,” Jerry Sullivan wrote in the Buffalo News.

Then Khalil Mack — a senior linebacker who had played one year of high school football and had one FBS scholarship offer — took over.

Nine tackles. Two and a half sacks. Two and a half tackles for loss. A 45-yard pick-six off Braxton Miller.

Ohio State won 40-20. The score was irrelevant. Every scout in the building left talking about the same player.

“My phone is blowing up with texts from personnel guys that are impressed with Khalil Mack,” NFL.com draft analyst Daniel Jeremiah tweeted during the game. “He’s a stud!”

Before the season, most draft experts considered Mack a second-round prospect. He left Columbus as something else.

“His stock in the draft just went up a little bit after playing against us,” Urban Meyer said the following Monday.

One Year of Football

Mack was a basketball player in Fort Pierce, Florida. He tore his patella tendon before his sophomore year of high school, and when the injury ended basketball, his football coach saw something.

“I looked at this kid about 6-1½, maybe 6-2, 210, maybe 215 pounds and pure ripped,” Waides Ashmon, the head coach at Fort Pierce Westwood High School, told the Buffalo News. “It was like, ‘What do I need to do to get you on the football field?’”

Mack played one season — his senior year. He made 110 tackles. Ashmon made a guarantee he had never made before.

“I told him, his mom and his dad, ‘If you’ll allow him to come play for me I guarantee you that he’ll go to college free,’” Ashmon told the Buffalo News.

Ashmon was right about the talent. The offers did not follow. ESPN did not rate Mack. 247Sports ranked him No. 2,252 nationally, No. 121 at his position. Buffalo, under Turner Gill, was the only FBS program that offered a scholarship.

“I was supposed to be one of those guys that went to a big school down in Florida,” Mack told the Buffalo News. “I always knew that I was good enough and I kind of felt like that motivated me enough to where I was going to be like, ‘All right, y’all gotta ball once you all get there because once I get to Buffalo there ain’t no holding back.’”

He started all 48 games of his college career. Buffalo went 2-10 his freshman year, 3-9 as a sophomore, 4-8 as a junior. Mack piled up sacks and tackles for loss against MAC competition while the program struggled to win. By his senior season, he was a three-time First-Team All-MAC selection. The league knew. The country did not.

Lou Tepper, Buffalo’s defensive coordinator, had coached Kevin Hardy and Alfred Williams — Butkus Award winners and first-round NFL draft picks — along with Simeon Rice, the No. 3 pick in the 1996 draft. He said Mack was different from all of them.

“This guy, he’s complete. He can do everything and I think he wants to be coached hard,” Tepper told the Buffalo News. “He wants to be great, not good.”

He wore No. 46 at Buffalo. EA Sports’ NCAA Football video game had given him a 46 overall rating. He kept the number.

The Game

Ohio State came out fast. Braxton Miller hit Devin Smith for 47 yards and a touchdown on the fourth play from scrimmage. Jordan Hall scored on runs of 49 and 37 yards before halftime, finishing with 159 yards. The Buckeyes looked like what they were — the No. 2 team in the country against a MAC opponent.

Mack intercepted a Miller screen pass in the second quarter, took it 45 yards the other way and dove for the pylon. He made sure of the dive. Two years earlier, he had returned an interception for a score, but officials wiped the touchdown off the board — they flagged him for extending the ball as he crossed the goal line. He told himself he would never let that happen again.

“I had to look back and see who was close,” Mack told the Buffalo News. “I knew I could stretch out and try to get the pylon.”

Jack Mewhort, Ohio State’s offensive lineman, was supposed to block him on the play.

“I throw a cut block, and I’m looking and I’m like, ‘Where is this guy?’” Mewhort told ESPN. “I didn’t feel anything. He had stepped back perfect, pushes me to the ground, gets that legendary interception and runs it back for a pick-six.”

“Wait ... he’s like Superman,” Mewhort said. “That’s not something that a college football player should be able to do against another college football player. That’s not fair.”

In the third quarter, Mack got to Miller again — a sack deep in Buckeye territory that jarred the ball free. Buffalo recovered at the 2. A hands-to-the-face call against Mack erased the play.

“It looked as if the Bulls were about to pull within three points of the No. 2 team in the country,” Sullivan wrote. “I began to wonder, where would it rank in the history of Buffalo sports upsets if they pulled it off? First?”

Buffalo lost 40-20 — well inside the 34½-point spread. The team that was supposed to get run out of the stadium covered by 14.

“Mack didn’t simply prove he belonged,” Sullivan wrote. “He was the best player on the field, a holy terror. He got noticed, all right.”

After Columbus

Urban Meyer did not sugarcoat it.

“They’ve got a kid that kicked our tails,” Meyer said after the game. “That outside linebacker had a couple of sacks, pressures. I know he beat guys that I expect to play very well on our offensive line.”

On Monday, Meyer went further: “Mack is a fantastic football player. I mean, he could play anywhere at any school in America.”

Art Briles, whose Baylor team played Buffalo the following week, had watched the tape. “It takes about one play to figure out who their guy is,” Briles told NFL.com. “I mean, he’s it.”

The draft boards shifted. Sullivan reported it the day of the game: “It’s not as if Mack isn’t on the NFL radar. He’s seen as a late first-round pick in next April’s draft. But from what I understand, the league’s personnel men were gushing over what they saw against the Buckeyes. You could sense Mack shooting up teams’ draft boards.”

Doug Mareski, the Buffalo Bills’ coordinator of college scouting, confirmed it months later.

“As a scout, I’m going to try to look at the best competition,” Mareski told the Buffalo News. “That would be the first game of the season, and he made a bunch of plays, and he got a little buzz going. That helps, no doubt. But when you look at every tape he’s on, he makes impact plays, whether it’s against San Diego State or Ohio State.”

Mack finished his senior season with 75 career tackles for loss — tied with Jason Babin of Western Michigan for the all-time NCAA FBS record. He set what was then the FBS record with 16 career forced fumbles. He won the MAC Defensive Player of the Year award — the first Buffalo player to win it — and the Jack Lambert Award as the nation’s top linebacker.

By draft week, Mike Mayock of NFL Network had him at the top of his board.

“I had Mack No. 1 on my board back at the combine, and I haven’t seen anything that would change my mind,” Mayock told the Buffalo News.

Jay Skurski, the Buffalo News reporter who covered Mack’s senior season, captured the improbability: “A player from UB — long the butt of college football jokes — potentially being the No. 1 pick in the draft? Disney would reject that script for being too hard to believe.”

The Oakland Raiders selected Mack fifth overall on May 8, 2014 — the highest-drafted player in UB history, the highest defensive player ever taken from the MAC and the first Buffalo player drafted in the first round.

Four picks ahead of him, Houston selected Jadeveon Clowney — the consensus No. 1 high school prospect in the 2011 class, a five-star recruit. Mack, the two-star with one FBS offer, went four spots later.

He became the first player in NFL history named First-Team All-Pro at two positions in the same season. He was named NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 2016 and selected to the NFL’s 2010s All-Decade Team. He has been named to nine Pro Bowls and surpassed 100 career sacks. In 2023 — a decade after the game in Columbus — he posted 17 sacks for the Los Angeles Chargers, a career high.

Why It Matters

Jeff Quinn, who coached Mack at Buffalo, watched what one player’s national visibility did for an entire program.

“It means that we’re going to have somebody that’s going to set the bar high,” Quinn told the Buffalo News. “It’s going to inspire our future players. We signed the highest-rated recruiting class in the history of our program this year. Why? Because we were on national TV, and they had a chance to see players like Khalil Mack.”

Before the draft, Mack reflected on what Buffalo had given him.

“I’m blessed to be in the position I’m in,” Mack told the Buffalo News. “I feel like it was God’s will that I ended up in Buffalo. Everybody’s asking me — from Florida to Buffalo, why, why? — It was God’s will. I feel like he placed me here, and I’m in the position I’m now.”

“It just goes to show a lot of people that hard work does pay off,” Mack said. “Throughout my career here, I didn’t think this could possibly happen, but it did.”

They told you it didn’t matter. Here are 100 reasons it does.