
Why win or lose vs. Notre Dame, I'm already wrong about Ryan Day
I’m already wrong about Ryan Day. This is a safe space, so I’ll admit that.
Let’s back up for a second. I wasn’t in the camp who said “fire him now” after he inexplicably lost to Michigan for the 4th consecutive year. I never claimed that Day was incapable of winning a national championship or that Ohio State would fall on its face in Round 1 against Tennessee. In fact, I even predicted that the Buckeyes would win the rematch with Oregon in the College Football Playoff quarterfinals.
But I was already wrong. Why? Well, I predicted that anything short of a national title would result in Day getting fired at season’s end.
“Ohio State’s gotta win it all or Ryan Day is gone…I firmly believe that.”@cjogara believes the stakes are HIGH for @OhioStateFB Head Coach Ryan Day heading into the College Football Playoff 😳 pic.twitter.com/2p0x0ivakx
— The Next Round (@NextRoundLive) December 12, 2024
I know. Let me and the others have it, Kirk Herbstreit. To be clear, there were plenty of others who felt that even if Ohio State lost on some sort of role-reversal controversial final play of a national championship game like 2002 vs. Miami, that Day would be fired by the recently hired Ross Bjork.
Wrong. Day is safe, regardless of what happens Monday night in the national championship against Notre Dame.
To get to this place is one thing, but Day followed an ideal path to get to the title game. In Round 1, he scoffed at the “Tennessee takeover” and laughed the Vols out of the building instead of letting that be the final straw on his time in Columbus. In the quarterfinals, he didn’t just lead a rematch victory against Oregon. He delivered a flawless game plan with an uppercut that had the lone FBS unbeaten spitting out blood by the end of the first quarter, which probably clinched his job security for another year. And when Texas made it a 4th quarter-game against Ohio State, Day’s hand-picked transfer quarterback led a go-ahead drive for the ages, which was followed by captain Jack Sawyer delivering the scoop-and-score seen ’round the world.
You know all of this. What you don’t know is that there are people like me who are willing to admit that they made a crucial error in judgment.
What I discounted in this new era of the Playoff is how a seemingly written-off team can use late-season failure as a rallying cry. We’ve already seen that in smaller sample sizes. That 2017 Alabama squad turned an Iron Bowl loss into a national championship while 2022 TCU turned a Big 12 Championship loss into a stunning upset of Michigan in the semifinal (don’t worry about what happened after that).
We’re entering an era in which this trajectory is more likely than ever. Ohio State provided that blueprint. It seems far less likely that we’ll have the flawless path of teams like 2019 LSU or 2022 Georgia. To be fair, that was true in the 4-team Playoff era. At least it was true to an extent. Those squads, as well as 2020 Alabama and 2018 Clemson were the lone 4 to pull off perfect seasons en route to a title.
(If your response to that is “but 2017 UCF,” that’s … a choice.)
There’ll be more teams that back into the Playoff and remind us that 3 weeks is a long time to regroup. Ohio State is proof of that.
Ohio State is also proof that it pays to be desperate. The Buckeyes closed the 2023 season not just with a loss to Michigan, but with a loss to Mizzou in the Cotton Bowl in which they set offensive football back decades. It set the stage for the ideal combination. That is, having a bunch of NFL Draft-eligible players who took advantage of an opportunity to earn NIL money and return to school, as well as having a coach like Day who did enough to finance such a push for that $20 million roster.
Maybe Day’s ability to do that — it’s not a given that a coach can net those results at even the richest schools — will always be lost in the mix. After all, it’s Ohio State. Its brand is as big as there is in the sport. But if there really was a belief that Day was a dead man walking heading into 2024, those NIL checks wouldn’t have been written. Guys are instead leaving for the highest bidder. Instead, Ohio State was the highest bidder with huge portal additions like Quinshon Judkins, Caleb Downs and Seth McLaughlin. Transfer QB Will Howard did his part, too.
That’s the part that skeptics won’t want to give Day any credit for. They’ll say “anyone can win with a $20 million roster” while conveniently overlooking the legwork it takes to obtain that in this era. And ironically enough, the Michigan losses, AKA Day’s only true blemish, surely played a part in fueling that urgency.
Perhaps that should’ve been the initial sign that Day could flip a script like he has since the Michigan loss. Picture if people like myself had gone on record with this take heading into December:
“Guys, Ryan Day is the same guy who built this $20 million roster after last year’s horrendous finish. Trust that you’ll see that on full display en route to a national title with 4 wins vs. AP Top-10 teams.”
That wouldn’t have been a popular take after that day in Columbus.
In reality, that take would’ve been spot on. Instead, people like me took the low-hanging fruit.
Then again, if Ohio State wins a title, doesn’t that technically mean that I was never proven wrong? Am I safe to declare a victory lap and claim that Day did the one thing to avoid getting fired?
Nah. In this safe space, I’ll declare that Day is safe.
My cold take? Not so much.