Ohio State Leads Big Ten with 164 Distinguished Scholars
The Ohio State Buckeyes' student-athletes often excel on the field, but many of them were recognized for their success in the classroom on Wednesday. The Big Ten Conference announced that a conference-best 164 student-athletes from The Ohio State University were given Big Ten Distinguished Scholar accolades.
The 164 honorees are also an Ohio State record, surpassing the 131 students recognized in 2018-2019. This is also the fifth consecutive year that the Buckeyes have led the conference in this category.
Here is the complete list of all student-athletes that were honored by the league office.
To qualify as a Big Ten Distinguished Scholar, a student must have earned Academic All-Big Ten recognition in the previous academic year, must have been enrolled full time at the institution for the entire previous academic year (two semesters or three quarters) and earned a minimum GPA of 3.70 or better during the previous academic year, excluding any summer grades. The awards have been issued dating back to 2008.
Twenty six Buckeyes earned a 4.0 GPA in 2019-2020, including football players Luke Farrell and Ben Schmiesing. C.J. Saunders, Zaid Hamdan and Ryan Batsch were all named Big Ten Distinguished Scholars on Wednesday. All five men are first-time honorees.
A rising senior, Farrell is from Perry, Ohio and has 24 career starts, including all 14 games last year for the Big Ten champion Buckeyes. He’s totaled 119 receiving yards in his career with two touchdowns while also blocking for a rushing attack that produced the school’s first-ever 2,000-yard rusher in 2019. He’s majoring in human development and family science.
Saunders, a team captain in 2019, graduated in May of 2019 with his bachelor’s degree in accounting and is currently a graduate student in sports management. He’s played in 23 career games with 27 receptions for 294 yards and one touchdown. From Dublin, Ohio, Saunders was Ohio State’s nominee for the 2019 Burlsworth Trophy, which is given annually to the most outstanding player in America, who began his career as a walk-on.
Hamdan is entering his third season with the football program and is majoring in criminology and criminal justice. He’s from Mason, Ohio and a graduate of Mason High School.
Schmiesing has been an OSU Scholar-Athlete in each of his two full years with the program and is a finance major. He’s from Piqua, Ohio.
Batsch, an exploration major, joined the program is the summer of 2018 and is a two-time Academic All-Big Ten honoree and OSU Scholar-Athlete. He’s a native of Loveland, Ohio.
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