Ad Disclosure
When Urban Meyer gave Ryan Day his coach’s whistle — I plead guilty to giggling at that statement — after Ohio State’s Rose Bowl win against Washington, it marked the end of a season full of Buckeye Fatigue.
We, as a nation experienced all of the worst for the entire year. It started when Meyer rightfully became the most scrutinized man in the sport before the season started for his lack of compassion and clarity in light of how he handled Zach Smith’s employment. The craziness leaked all the way into the Saturday after Thanksgiving when Gus Johnson used his platform on Fox to praise Meyer for the head coach’s ability to exist and thrive in a cesspool he created. There’s more, but why force everyone to dip into their mental health insurance co-pays so early in the calendar year? Let’s be thankful it’s over.
Yes, the 2018 Bucks provided so much material for columns, sports talk radio, and podcasts. The program, most notably Meyer, allowed everyone on twitter with a profile picture of Brutus Buckeye carrying a football to effort the mastery of four-letter words as they fended off dissenting opinions outside of their own. Thank God it’s over.
The Buckeyes’ win over Washington came with a sense of finality. Meyer can teach whatever class the business college deems suitable for him, though creative fiction would be a good fit too. Dwayne Haskins will leave for the NFL. Ryan Day can get on with it and hopefully find immediate success.
Immediate success you say? Shouldn’t Ohio State reign supreme as the conference’s most unlikable teams? Sure should. Any sort of controversy that inhibits an elite program from maintaining its peak level of success brings out the most desperate and tiresome of its fan base. The sort of people performing Script Ohio outside of a Sandusky rest area. We never want to hear from these people, but we certainly don’t want to hear from them regarding Urban Meyer.
The sooner Day succeeds in the capacity of head coach, the sooner we can all close the book on the Meyer era. All the misdeeds, the program operating with a full party in the basement while the parents absentmindedly check their stock returns upstairs, that should all be done. Day bore witness to all the hysterics firsthand. I assume he’s smart enough to not want to endure them. Same goes for hiring any Spaudling Smails for his coaching staff.
Immediate (relative) success in Day’s first two seasons will be the best thing to happen to the rest of college football, especially with Meyer so closely associated with the program.
If he rode off into the sunset after the Rose Bowl, content to live the rest of his life in the college coach’s version of the Heisman House scribbling plays on cocktail napkins with Phil Fulmer while Steve Spurrier tries to organize a pushup content, there wouldn’t be a spiked sense of urgency about Day’s immediate success. However, Ohio State, unruffled by public perception and familiar with living in a swirl of unnecessary noise, kept Meyer on the university payroll as an associate athletic director. As long as he’s watching games from one of the university’s luxury suites there’s going to be murmurs of how the invigorated, re-energized, re-prioritized Meyer will do things differently if he had a second tour in Columbus.
The murmurs will grow louder with every Ohio State loss. It’s for our best interests that Ryan Day succeeds.
We can’t go through this again.
Nick is a writer for saturdaytradition.com. Your overuse of GIFs forced him away from Twitter. He removed himself from consideration in the Vanderbilt heading coaching search.