Ryan Day was already in a unique position. Entering this year, Ohio State’s coach since 2019 was the most successful failure in the sport, a man who justifiably had fans after his job despite a record of double-digit wins every season. On Saturday, Day shifted from the most successful failure in college football to something slightly different: a total failure who still has a chance to hit it big. In a few weeks, Ohio State will be a national champion, be on the hunt for a new head coach, or—least likely, in my opinion—scrambling to explain to its fan base why it’s keeping the underachieving coach it has now.
The Buckeyes lost Saturday for the fourth year in a row to Michigan. The final score was 13–10. Michigan players planted their flag at midfield at Ohio Stadium, and Ohio State players started a big brawl with them, ceding the moral high ground after already losing the game. Each of this streak’s losses to Michigan has been crushing, but this was the worst. The past three came against national championship–contending (and one national championship–winning) Michigans. This one came against a Wolverine husk that entered the game at 6–5 and had not beaten a good team all season. In one afternoon, the Buckeyes let their rivals turn an awful season into a pretty respectable step-back year and left themselves in disarray.
The new 12-team College Football Playoff makes this an unprecedented situation. Ohio State, the bluest of blue bloods, has a coach who is almost certainly not up to the two jobs an Ohio State coach holds. Historically, one job was to beat Michigan, and doing that would almost always mean Ohio State was in the hunt for its other job, winning the national title. Day’s success outside these two jobs has essentially never mattered, and will not matter after this season, to his legacy at Ohio State. Now Ohio State cannot beat Michigan, but the expanded playoff decouples one job from another. The Buckeyes knocked themselves out of the Big Ten championship game with Saturday’s loss, but they are still a lock for the playoff, which means Day is about to do one of two things. He will get it together and salvage himself by winning it all this year, or he will leave no doubt in the minds of most Ohio State fans that he has failed and will never get it done. By that point, it would be reckless for Ohio State not to fire him, though the school has no reason to be public about it.
The loss on Saturday was, really, one of the worst in Ohio State history. Michigan is the epitome of mediocrity, a team without a Division I starting quarterback and with a so-so offensive line and bad receivers. The defense remains solid but was missing one of its best players, cornerback Will Johnson. The Buckeyes, armed with a roster that on paper is one of the sport’s best in years, were 20.5-point favorites. Any Michigan fan who claims to have thought victory was gettable is exaggerating. The Wolverines in my life were planning to get very intoxicated and remind themselves how shiny last year’s championship trophy was. For Ohio State, this was only slightly less of a layup than a game against Akron.
That was the idea, anyway. It turned out that Day did not have Ohio State’s offense ready to participate in this game. Quarterback Will Howard was terrible, a one-man repudiation of Day’s longtime strength as a developer of quarterbacks. The offensive line was incapable, partially because of a late-season injury to the starting center but mostly because Day has failed to recruit or develop the position group at a sufficient level. Ohio State’s defense played well, as it almost always does under coordinator Jim Knowles, but a team that scores 10 points can lose to anyone.
The loss amplifies Day’s biggest weakness: that he’s unable to solve the rival program that Ohio State most needs to beat, for both its postseason positioning and state pride. Day’s lone win against Michigan was in 2019, and the Wolverines’ capacity this season to out-physical Ohio State even in such a disastrous year for them is damning. The loss also undermines Day’s supposed strengths. He has avoided inexplicable losses to the Big Ten’s middle-class teams, allowing him to pile up nice records even as he loses the big games, but this year’s Michigan might as well be Northwestern. Again, Day has a reputation as a quarterback developer, but here he and well-compensated offensive coordinator Chip Kelly could not prepare their senior QB, Howard, to play competently in the most important game.
Usually, winning 10 games a year is a good defense against charges that a coach isn’t built for his job. Day is an exceptional case. Ohio State has the most built-in advantages of any program in the sport. Any warm-bodied head coach would have to try exceedingly hard not to win eight or nine games at Ohio State, and a random person pulled off the street would have a good chance at bowl eligibility. A 6–7 season in 2011, under an interim coach and amid a silly scandal involving tattoos, is the program’s modern low point. It would be difficult to repeat in a world where Ohio State’s supporters can and do pay players. The Buckeyes’ payroll is not public record but is, most everyone agrees, among the top handful in the country. (A frequently ballparked industry estimate is that this year’s team cost $20 million.)
Ohio State is in the business not of winning 10 games, then, but of winning specific ones at the end of the year. Day would cost tens of millions of dollars to fire, but Ohio State can afford approximately anything when the optimization of its football program is at issue. The Buckeyes will fire Day when their most powerful donors and campus officials doubt he can do the job, and right now it’s not easy to find people who sincerely believe in him. Day was a somewhat unheralded offensive assistant when the school promoted him to succeed Urban Meyer in 2019. While Day has conducted himself with integrity and is a much better guy than the favor-trading and alleged abuser-coddling Meyer, Ohio State is not a moral enterprise.
The problem is that Ohio State cannot fire Day right now. The Buckeyes have a playoff ahead of them. Their meltdown on Saturday does not change that there are only four or five teams with the talent to win the whole thing if everything goes well, and Ohio State is still one of them. When they’re on, they’re dominant, as they were when they destroyed playoff-bound Indiana the week before Michigan. Earlier in the year, they played unbeaten No. 1 Oregon down to the literal final second on the road. Ohio State’s chance of winning the national title this year is at least 15 percent or so, and that’s just too good an opportunity to fire Day and throw the program into chaos right before the games begin.
After all, this is Ohio State. The Buckeyes do not need to worry about getting a jump on the coaching market as jobs change hands over the next two or three weeks. The coaching carousel would revolve around Ohio State whenever Day’s job opened, so the school has no reason not to take its time. Last year, when Alabama’s Nick Saban retired in January, the juggernaut replaced the best coach ever just two days later with a guy who had coached Washington in the national title game the same week.
Day must know of all of that. His chance for redemption is clear, and it requires him to at least make a deep playoff run and quite possibly win the whole thing. Soon, Ohio State probably has to be one of three things: the reigning national champion, a school looking for a new head coach, or an administration trying to fundraise while its most visible employee has lost the faith of most people who care about the program. If the Buckeye brass allows it to reach that point, they will only be forestalling the inevitable.
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