Ohio State football coach Ryan Day has been criticized since a week two loss against Oregon back in 2021. Things did not get any better for him when Ohio State lost to Michigan for the first time in a decade later that season. After a second consecutive loss to the Wolverines the next season, fans across the country began calling for his job. Matters only got worse each of the following two seasons. After ripping off four two-score wins on his way to a National Championship, Day now has many of those fans quieted down, and yes, they do owe him an apology.
Breaking down all ten of Day’s losses and why most of them aren’t that bad
Ryan Day has a record of 70-10 as a head coach, second best in FBS history among coaches who have coached at least 50 games. The record itself is impressive, but let’s break down the 10 losses. The 2019 College Football Playoff Semifinal loss against Clemson was a heartbreaker, in which the Buckeyes fell to the Tigers 29-23. Clemson was a very good team, and like the Buckeyes, they entered that game 13-0. Yes, Ohio State made some mistakes and failed to capitalize in the red zone, but this game should not be used against Day, especially considering the refs were from the SEC (that’s a whole separate article).
The following season, Ohio State, again, played an undefeated Clemson team in the semifinals, winning 49-28, which everyone seems to forget when they say he can’t win a big game. However, the Buckeyes would fall to Alabama in the National Championship, 52-24. Perhaps playing man coverage on DeVonta Smith, the 2020 Heisman winner, wasn’t the best choice, but that Alabama team was just so much better than Ohio State.
The first game someone could truly say he didn’t do a very good job coaching was the week two loss to Oregon in 2021. They simply could not stop the run. Oregon continually ran a counter play that seemed to have the defense baffled, and it resulted in a 35-28 loss. We do know, though, that early-season struggles, win or lose, are not uncommon with Ohio State, even under Urban Meyer. Ohio State ripped through the next eight games with relative ease, including a 56-7 win over a top-10 Michigan State team, which is another game that seems to have vanished from the memories of Ryan Day nay-sayers.
The final week of the 2021 regular season resulted in Ohio State’s first loss to Michigan in 10 years. What happened? Well, I would say Ohio State’s defense was simply not that good that season. Like it did in the Oregon game, the Buckeye’s defense could not stop the run. The Wolverines won that game 42-27, and it had to happen eventually; you can’t win every game against Michigan. As great as that would be, the streak was going to end sometime.
The 2022 game against Michigan was a bit concerning. The defensive game plan was clear: make Michigan win by throwing the ball. Ohio State bottled up the run all first half and put the game in the hands of its secondary. The problem was that Ohio State’s cornerbacks forgot how to tackle, and in some cases, they forgot how to even cover a receiver, leading to multiple short throws that resulted in touchdowns or wide open passes downfield. In the second half, Day took a while to adjust, but once he did, the Wolverine ground game took over, giving them a 45-23 victory.
One game later, against eventual National Champion Georgia, the Buckeyes played the game of their lives and had Georgia on the ropes. Ohio State didn’t have running back TreVeyon Henderson or wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba, but still generated a 38-24 lead. However, when receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. left the game with a head injury, Ohio State’s offense became stagnant, generating just three fourth quarter points. Through all of that, the Buckeyes were one field goal away from going to the championship, but Noah Ruggles’ kick wasn’t even close, and the Buckeyes lost 42-41 to a juggernaut.
Ohio State’s only regular season loss in 2023 came against Michigan, losing 30-24. This one is simple. It is very hard to win a football game against a top-five team when Kyle McCord is taking the snaps. He threw a pass on a slant route straight at Michigan’s Will Johnson, setting up a first and goal for the Wolverines, so he essentially spotted them seven points. On Ohio State’s final drive, he panicked under pressure, so he did what he had been doing since high school and threw it somewhere in the general direction of Harrison Jr., but he forgot that he was playing a top-three team and not Archbishop Wood High School back in Philly, so he got picked off. In terms of Day in that game, there was a late-half situation where he could have gone for a fourth-and-four or let the clock run down and kick a long field goal in which he chose the latter, and the kick was no good, but that was user’s choice and I don’t think there was necessarily poor coaching in that situation.
Ohio State also lost the Cotton Bowl to Missouri in 2023, but I usually discount that game because McCord, Harrison and others opted out, and the backup, Devin Brown, got injured very early in that game, leaving Ohio State with a true freshman going up against a pretty good Missouri defense. They fought, and actually held a 3-0 in the fourth, but the defense just got gassed, and Ohio State lost 14-3.
This past season, Ohio State lost at Oregon by one point. Yes, of course I wanted them to win, but I’m not going to sit here and call it a poor coaching job when you go on the road to play the team that finished the regular season ranked No. 1 and lose by one point. People say Will Howard sliding at the end of regulation and not getting down sooner or throwing the ball away is a result of bad coaching, but whether he was told what to do in that situation or not, a fifth-year quarterback should know what to do with six seconds and a timeout.
The loss this season to Michigan is not something that I will begin to defend. I will, however, say that if Jayden Fielding didn’t go 1-for-3 on field goals, or had Howard not thrown two bad interceptions, Ohio State probably would have won. Those things happen though, and as a coach, you have to be prepared for your guys to have off-days. I get it, you want to out-physical them. Especially them. You want to dominate. At some point, though, maybe throw the ball to your receiving corp full of NFL talent instead of running the ball on third and eight. The only touchdown Ohio State scored in that game was the result of a two-minute dive at the end of the first half because they were forced to throw the ball in order to get down the field quickly. That one was bad. That one was really bad. That game was supposed to be a feel-better game after losing the last three years. It was supposed to be a chance to beat down on an inferior team. Day not only avoided using his team’s strengths, but actually played into the opponent’s. That’s only the second “truly not great” game, though. That was only the second time where it was 60 minutes of Day not being able to figure anything out in a game where he should have; the 2021 Oregon game being the first. The Alabama game, again; what are you going to do against that roster?
Let’s not also forget that Urban Meyer had a few games against Purdue and Iowa in which there were no answers. I don’t mean “lose by three” no answers, I mean he lost to those two teams by a combined 60 points in back-to-back years. He also had a 31-0 loss in the semifinals to Clemson as well. People also bring up that Meyer went 7-0 against Michigan, but it’s not like he had to play Michigan when they were in the top five three years in a row like Day did. He played and beat the team in 2016 when Michigan was third, and he did so again in 2018 when it was fourth, but that was a pretty fraudulent Michigan team. I know it’s only one game, but Day actually has beaten Michigan, which is something else people seem to forget.
Why the criticism has been unfair
Day’s biggest haters absolutely love to ignore the fact that he’s beaten Penn State multiple times while the Nittany Lions were in the top 10, as well as Notre Dame in the 2022 and 2023 seasons.
Since taking over at Ohio State, Day has beaten 20 teams that have finished in the final AP Top 25. That means one in every four games he coaches, he’s beating a top 25 team. He has also posted a 13-8 record against teams who have finished in the top 12.
One of the final arguments to address is people say Ohio State bought their roster because they dished out $20.2 million. To start, a lot of that money went to returning players, such as nearly the entire defense. Ohio State only brought in a few impact transfers. It took in safety Caleb Downs from Alabama, center Seth McLaughlin from Alabama, running back Quinshon Judkins from Ole Miss, tight end Will Kacmarek from Ohio and quarterback Will Howard from Kansas State. That alone is something people forget, but even if the Buckeyes had built a roster full of transfers, let’s look around the country to see what other teams spent and what they got out of it.
The Oregon Ducks were the country’s top spender at $23 million, and while that got them a championship in their new conference, they got no playoff wins. Texas spent $22.2 million for wins against two of the three lowest AP ranked teams in the playoffs. Ohio State was third, and coming in behind them was LSU at $20.1 million, which is a lot to spend to go 9-4 with a win in the Texas Bowl. Georgia spent $18.3 million to win nothing in the playoffs, and Texas A&M spent $17.2 million to go 8-4 and lose to a 6-6 USC team in the Las Vegas Bowl. Outside of Ohio State, the top six spenders spent an average of $20.16 million dollars, just short of what Ohio State spent, and all of those teams combined for half the amount of playoff wins Ohio State had. Ohio State had as many wins against those teams in the playoffs as those teams had playoff wins. Texas was the only one that had playoff wins, and Ohio State doubled the Longhorns up when the teams played each other. Even if we take into account the non-playoff teams’ results, Ohio State had more wins in bowl season than these other teams had combined. So this idea that Ohio State just “bought a championship” is completely wrong. You can spend millions of dollars, sure, and are some teams at an advantage because not everyone can do that? Of course, but you still have to perform and come up with the right schemes and matchups to create on-field advantages. You have to have the right guy at the helm, and Ohio State certainly did.
Breaking down Day’s four-game run that silenced his doubters
On Dec. 1, Day was backed into a corner with nearly the entire country calling for his job. What does he do? He rips off what might be the best four-game stretch we’ve seen. He took down four AP top-eight teams and three AP top-five teams in one playoff run on his way to a National Championship. Ohio State’s average margin of victory in its four playoff games was 17.5 points. Against the three AP top-five opponents, it was 15 points. Looking at the final AP Poll, Ohio State beat six of the other nine teams in the top 10. The Buckeyes beat every other team that made the semifinals and the other four teams in the top five. The fact that he was able to keep the locker room and get them ready to play the way they did in the playoffs after the Michigan game should not be overlooked.
Offensively, the playbook was so creative in the playoffs. We saw things that we hadn’t seen all year. There were pre-snap motions, total shifts of the formation, rollouts, half rollouts, throwbacks to the tight end and misdirection plays. I know wide receiver Emeka Egbuka fumbled, but that play where they ran a mis-direction and a pop-pass to him against Notre Dame was phenomenal.
All season long, it felt like offensive coordinator Chip Kelly was holding back the offense. It felt not as if he was trying to be too fancy, but he was calling restrictive plays –plays that get the ball to the playmakers, but not at all far down the field. It seemed that he figured as long as he got the ball to them, they would do all of the work and turn it into a big play. In the playoffs, however, he opened up the playbook and used the whole field. He kept the defenses off balance. There would be a nice run and a few chunk passes. Then when the defense softens up, he’d hit them with the quick screens he loves, or a motion play to a receiver to get him in space, and there would actually be space because the defense was looking for the deep ball. That was the Chip Kelly creativity we had heard all the analysts raving about all year.
Defensively, those guys came back just for this. They maybe got overshadowed by the offense in this playoff run, but we have to give them credit. How great were they? Starting with the Tennessee game, they were just as big a part of that 21-0 lead as the offense. From the first drive, it was clear it was going to be a long night. They gave up 10 straight points late in the first half, but got it fixed at halftime, and only gave up a garbage time touchdown in the second half.
Against Oregon, the defense had quarterback Dillon Gabriel, who has been playing college football since the BCS era, confused. The defensive line did an amazing job with containing as well, but that secondary just had him lost.
OSU struggled with the running backs catching passes against Texas, but the team got it figured out when it counted and executed the goal line stand to absolute perfection.
In the Championship, the Irish went down the field and dominated with the quarterback run on the first drive, but defensive line coach Larry Johnson got after his guys on the sideline after that drive, and Notre Dame was forced to throw the ball the rest of the game.
The secondary did commit some penalties and gave up some plays later in that game, and I don’t want to fully excuse that, but we knew Notre Dame was going to make a push. Beating Notre Dame is like killing a cockroach. You can never be sure that the job is done until the clock hits zero. They simply do not go away. With that in mind, it wasn’t shocking they fought back late in that game. The secondary, however, played a very good two-and-a-half quarters in that game and forced incompletions in a goal-to-go situation in the fourth quarter, leading to a key missed field goal.
Against the four top-10 teams the defense faced in the playoffs, it gave up an average of just 18.75 points per game.
Even the kicker, Jayden Fielding, cleaned up his act after going 1-3 against Michigan. He went 4-5 in the playoffs, including a pair of 46-yard field goals, while his only miss came at the end of the first half against Tennessee, when he missed a 56-yard attempt.
The future for Day
Ryan Day still does need to get back in the win column against Michigan, and you can bet we’ll hear all about it leading up to that game next year, but for now, he’s on top of the college football world. I will be the first to say, I will be skeptical going into that game, even if Michigan is not especially good. If Day coaches the way he did in the postseason, I would think Ohio State would win. However, as we’ve seen in the past, over the course of a regular season, things can get a little sloppy, and the Wolverines take advantage. The best version of Ryan Day we have seen has been after losses (the 42-41 loss to Georgia after losing to Michigan in 2022, and this past playoff run after losing to Michigan). It will be interesting to see if he can carry this momentum into next year and dominate as a favorite, and not when his back is against the wall.
The main point, though, is the narrative that Day is not a good coach, or can’t win a big game, is simply just not true.
Even though they won’t be lining at up at his door and apologizing one by one like they should, the critics are running out of ammo to use on Ryan Day,
and they have to accept that he is a top coach in college football.
Demetri Manousos is a reporter. Contact him at [email protected].