Talent gives you a ceiling. Growth determines whether you ever reach it.

That may be one of the simplest ways to separate championship football teams from merely good ones.

Almost every team that reaches the highest level of college football is talented. Ohio State certainly is. The Buckeyes have future NFL players all over the field, the best player in the country in Jeremiah Smith, a quarterback capable of making all the throws, and enough depth to survive injuries that would cripple most programs.

None of that guarantees anything.

Championship teams are usually the ones that evolve. Problems that were obvious in September are less obvious in October. Players settle into roles. Coaches learn what their roster does best and stop trying to force what it does not. Weaknesses do not necessarily disappear, but they become smaller, and strengths become increasingly difficult for opponents to deal with.

That is what has been encouraging about Ohio State over the past few weeks. The Buckeyes are beginning to look different.

The team that lost at Texas had obvious problems. Ohio State built a 23-3 lead and could not finish the game. The offensive line struggled at critical moments, the running game had not yet established a clear identity, and the Buckeyes failed to respond once Texas seized momentum in the fourth quarter.

A month later, Ohio State went into Kinnick Stadium against No. 14 Iowa and looked far more complete.

The Buckeyes did not simply win, 31-14. They controlled much of the game. They outgained Iowa 484-238, held the Hawkeyes to 39 rushing yards, possessed the ball for more than 38 minutes, and finished the game by doing something good teams eventually have to learn how to do: put an opponent away.

Ryan Day talked afterward about wanting his team to play a complete 60 minutes. Against Iowa, it did.

There are still things to fix. Nine penalties are too many. The offensive line still has moments where it creates problems for itself, and special teams have not exactly inspired confidence every week, either.

But that is not really the point.

The point is that some of the things that looked like major concerns a few weeks ago no longer feel quite as concerning.

Take the running game.

Ohio State entered the season with options at running back but without a clear answer. Bo Jackson had the pedigree and explosiveness. Isaiah West was another talented option. Ja’Kobi Jackson entered the season as part of a crowded rotation rather than the obvious answer at running back.

That may be changing.

Ja’Kobi made his first start as a Buckeye Saturday and ran 14 times for 72 yards and a touchdown. The numbers themselves are solid, but they do not completely explain what he has brought to the offense.

He runs angry.

Jackson gets downhill, finishes runs, falls forward, and seems perfectly comfortable turning a four-yard gain into a five-yard gain by running through somebody to get it. Against Iowa, none of his carries went for negative yardage.

Whether Day and the coaching staff officially consider him RB1 almost does not matter at this point. He has earned a larger role, and Ohio State appears to have learned something about its offense in the process.

Sometimes growth is a player improving. Sometimes it is a coaching staff realizing which player gives the team what it needs.

The same thing is happening elsewhere.

Julian Sayin looks increasingly comfortable. The defense responded after allowing Illinois more success on the ground than anyone wanted to see. The Buckeyes went from failing to finish against Texas to controlling the second half against Iowa in one of the more difficult road environments in the Big Ten.

That does not mean every issue is solved, nor should anyone expect Ohio State to become a finished product in early October. In fact, the best teams rarely are.

That is why the next several weeks matter so much.

Ohio State does not need to look like the team it wants to be in December right now. It needs to look more like that team next Saturday than it did last Saturday.

Rinse and repeat until you're hoisting hardware.

The process sounds simple, but it is one of the hardest things in sports. Every opponent exposes something different. Every injury forces an adjustment. Young players improve at different speeds, veterans settle into different roles, and coaches have to constantly decide which problems require major changes and which ones simply require patience.

The teams that figure those things out fastest usually survive. The ones that do not eventually run into an opponent talented enough to expose every flaw they never fixed (See:  Ohio State 2025).

Ohio State has already been given one painful example of that this season. The collapse at Texas showed the Buckeyes what happens when a good team fails to finish.

What matters now is what they do with the lesson. Saturday provided another piece of evidence that they are learning from it.

There will be harder tests ahead, including Michigan and, if Ohio State accomplishes what it expects to accomplish, postseason football. By then, the Buckeyes will need to be better than they are today.

The encouraging part is that they already are better than they were a month ago.

Ohio State has always had enough talent to win a championship.

Now we are beginning to find out whether it can become the team capable of doing it.