COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ryan Day needs to remember who he is. That’s the only way Ohio State has any chance of winning a national championship.
The entire reason Day became the Buckeyes’ head coach in the first place is because he brought innovative offensive ideas to the table with plans of turning Columbus into the premier destination for elite quarterbacks and wide receivers. Then he spent his final year as the offensive coordinator in 2018 showing what that could look like, using Dwayne Haskins to rewrite the school’s passing records.
That’s who OSU needs to show up on Saturday night. Not this new version of him who’s shocked by failed game plans and uptight in the games where his fiery personality is needed most.
They need the old version that got him this job in the first place. The baby-faced aggressive coach in the picture above could get a defense on its heels and lived out the term ‘Let it rip’ on the football field and not just at the podium during a press conference.
“You do have to be that way,” Day said. “It’s how you coach. How you approach it. It’s how the guys play. It’s confidence. It’s all of those things. We’ve gotta do that in all three phases. We have to be and we will.”
That guy dropped 62 on Michigan then followed up with 56 the next year with Justin Fields under center. He had Clemson on its heels in the 2019 Fiesta Bowl for most of the first half, then made the Tigers feel his wrath a year later in the Sugar Bowl to avenge that 2019 loss. He’s responsible for college football’s most lethal offense in 2021 with C.J. Stroud as its face. He’s who took Georgia to the brink in the 2022 Peach Bowl where an unfortunate series of injuries left OSU so short-handed that you could only applaud a one-point loss.
That person has been missing in action way too often lately and it seems to be traced back to Nov. 27, 2021. Losing to Michigan the way they did four years ago continues to linger around the program in a way that’s created a motivation to unnecessarily prove something no one asked him to prove.
He has a Michigan problem, and he’s letting it impact everything else whether he wants to admit it or not.
“You can look at it a million different ways which you can imagine we have too,” Day said. “At the end of the day, you’ve gotta put your players in a situation to be successful and then we’ve gotta execute. We do. We have to take care of the ball, but we also have to be aggressive. It comes down to both of those things. …We can’t sit there and crawl up into a shell, but at the same time, we can’t be reckless with the ball either.”
There is a fine line between reckless and aggressive. At its best Ohio State has walked it effortlessly under Day mixing explosiveness and efficiency in a way that very few others ever have. But they have to choose to be that way and it starts with him.
It starts with the way Day approaches a game regardless of who is on the other sideline. Way too often he’s chosen to do the opposite and now finds himself in a situation where it’s a non-negotiable.
“When you get into these games you’ve gotta go after people,” Day said. ” You’ve gotta be aggressive. We have to do that that. We have to game plan the right way and a big part of it is the confidence going into the game. Make sure you know what you’re doing and you know that you feel like the game plan is clean and you can execute at a high level. Then you go to work.
“I know it doesn’t feel like that coming off the last game. But once you get away from it and you get focused on the new opponent it’s easy to build confidence from it knowing when you look a the body of work and what guys have done this season there’s a lot to point to. When you look at the guys around you, you’ve got good players next to you.”
Ohio State needs the very best version of Day. So much rides on that guy walking into Ohio Stadium from the legacy of his first crop of players to potentially literal employment. If he shows up, anything is possible. If the new guy we’ve seen since Nov. 27, 2021, shows his face, nothing is.
The Buckeyes have already shown on defense how they’re willing to look in the mirror and recognize that things are working and need to change. The defense went through this after giving up 32 points to Oregon in a loss and the result was encouraging defensive coordinator Jim Knowles to get back to his roots. Back to the version of him that made him a no-brainer hire for Day in the first place.
The result was a defense that’s made a strong case for being the nation’s best with little to no holes in it.
“What are we doing wrong?” Knowles said of the conversations he and Day had after the loss to the Ducks. “How do we get better? How do we put the players in better position? What are some of the things we’ve done in the past that we can utilize? What tweaks do we make to it? What do our guys do well? What do they struggle with? All of those things.
“It was a great process to be a part of. Not an overhaul but a reevaluation at that. That game was not what we wanted it to be so we had to take a look at ourselves. It’s about winning. When we don’t play well enough we’ve gotta take a look a that.”
Now the shoe is on the other foot.
Knowles went through his two weeks of soul searching after the last loss and greatness was born out of it. Day has spent the past three weeks going through the most important self-evaluation of his career. Maybe something great can come from that because it has to.
Sometimes the answer is as simple as getting back to the basics. Returning to your roots and remembering where you came from can often be the only medicine you need to shake off whatever burden weighing you down.
Day’s burden is in Ann Arbor and it’ll be another 12 months before he can face that demon again. But he can at least release himself from whatever hill he’s created in his head that’s kept the version fans first met from showing up when it matters most.
Only one person is standing in the way of Ohio State and a potentially historic run and it’s on him to change that by reminding himself of what made him Smith’s choice to succeed Urban Meyer.
It’s time to ‘Let it rip,’ Ryan Day. Everything you could imagine is on the line if you don’t.
“We’ll do everything we can to address the issues coming off of the last game so that we can attack and can be aggressive in the game,” Day said.