The Ohio State Buckeyes might be the defending college football national champions, but for all intents and purposes, they’re trying hard not to remember it.
In an interview with CBS Sports’ Josh Pate released Thursday, OSU coach Ryan Day revealed the unconventional and honestly very cool way this season’s Buckeyes are keeping themselves motivated—and how they’re actively working to avoid complacency as a result of last year’s victory.
The response came after Pate asked Day whether incentive is an issue for this upcoming squad, considering (1) many of the national championship players left for the draft and (2) many of those remaining didn’t have much to do with the win, at least on the field.
“We brought the leadership committee in [after the season] and we talked about what we want to get done … and the first thing was reinforce the culture,” Day told Pate. “And the leaders from this year’s group said, ‘Reinforce? There’s guys in this room that don’t even know what the culture is. You’ve gotta rebuild the culture.’
“And they asked for a lot of the national championship paraphernalia to be taken down in the facility because they’re like, ‘We didn’t win a national championship. The last group did.’ So that was a good sign because they understood that this was going to be a new year.”
The point? The 2024–25 Buckeyes are national champs, not the 2025–26 squad … at least not yet.
Watch that question answer below starting at 28:58:
Day also took a moment to address criticism that the school essentially bought itself the natty with NIL money.
“The truth is the majority of those guys were all guys that decided to come back or were already on the team that we recruited and developed,” he noted of the strong roster. “We did add six or seven guys, but not 15, not 20, where we went out there and just got the best players in college football. That wasn’t the case. That’s not what won us a championship.”
He added, “I think that’s where it’s just easy for people to say, you know, Ohio State had NIL for this amount of money or whatever that is, and it’s just so cheap and so easy for someone to say.” But “if you actually do the research, all it does is really tell you the value of an Ohio State football player.”
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