Ryan Day will not be fired. It never should have even been an honest talking point among the media and parts of the Ohio State fanbase that ABC’s Kirk Herbstreit labeled as the “lunatic fringe,” Saturday night in a sardonic spiel at the end of Ohio State’s 42-17 curb-stomping of Tennessee in the first round of the College Football Playoff.
Day is a prisoner of both his own successes and failures. Under him, the Buckeyes are 1-4 against Michigan, 2-3 in the CFP, and 65-3 against every other opponent he’s faced. Day’s Buckeyes have done most of the requisite things to try and bust through this odd ceiling: Michigan and the College Football Playoff.
His get out-of-jail card for a while was that he didn’t take embarrassing losses to the likes of Purdue and Iowa, like Urban Meyer did as a huge favorite. But Thanksgiving weekend was a double whammy: a loss to the Wolverines as nearly a three-touchdown favorite and an embarrassing on-field melee postgame. The losses include embarrassments to the two best Michigan teams in the last 25 years and a missed field goal to eventual national champion Georgia at the stroke of midnight.
Ohio State is currently favored to beat Oregon in a Rose Bowl rematch on New Year’s Day and holds the second-best odds to win a national championship at +360, behind Texas (+310). Would a national title give Day a clean slate with the Bucknuts? There may be an asterisk involved, depending on who you ask.
Even if Saturday was the last game of the season, the fact is Day is 66-10 in Columbus, including three games in 2018 when Meyer was suspended. Who’s doing better than that?
When you have success like Day’s, you’re more likely to be approximately the most successful in a school’s history, but such is the task at Ohio State. Of coaches even close, that fit the bill: Larry Coker got fired and Miami spent 20 years trying to get “back,” Mark Richt got fired at Georgia and Kirby Smart has taken the team to new heights, but both coaches were clearly slipping when they were fired. It might seem like Day and Ohio State are spinning their wheels, but if they are stuck it happens to be at the top of the sport.
The popular thing was to say that if Ohio State lost to Tennessee, then it should can him. Sometimes the devil that you do know is better than the one you don’t, and nobody knows the ramifications of firing a coach at a $35 million-plus price tag in the rev share era we’re likely to enter July 1. Florida and Baylor each neglected to be the guinea pigs of this cycle. North Carolina ran a farcical search and ended up with Bill Belichick. Would Ohio State have been willing to take a bold and expensive gamble like that?
Ohio State is never bad you, might say, it’s turnkey. Well, you could say the same about Oklahoma, which just limped to 6-6 and looked like it didn’t belong in the SEC. Texas fired Mack Brown in 2013 and spent a decade in the wilderness. Florida has had scant success in its post-Urban Meyer era.
Watch Ohio State’s roster Saturday night, the underclassmen making plays — Jeremiah Smith, perhaps the best freshman receiver in the history of college football, and sophomore safety Caleb Downs, who could be a first-round pick if he left school today — and ask yourself if Ohio State would really have been willing to possibly blow up the bones of that roster in the name of an emotionally-charged coaching decision to placate the fringe. As Chris Fowler noted as the game wound down, “it’s nonsense really, the public doesn’t pull the trigger; the administrators do and they’re behind him.”
It is easy for anyone in college sports to imagine that throwing money down a buyout hole and at a new coach will solve the problem. Ask LSU and USC how well that’s going right now. Texas A&M paid the exorbitant amount of money to fire Jimbo Fisher, returns are early on Mike Elko but the Aggies just lost to their hated rival without an offensive touchdown and finished an inconsistent 8-4. Winning is not a birthright in college football especially as the amount of parity will increase in a revenue sharing future.
There are options beyond the nuclear one. Continuing to give Day the resources in order to win is the more difficult solution based on public perception, but there is a way for Day to show publicly he’s doing what’s necessary to continue to level Ohio state up. We’ve seen Mike Gundy, Mike Norvell and Kelly donate salary back to their programs to help fund their roster.
Ohio State already has one of the highest-paid rosters in the sport, but every little bit helps. Day has already made the coordinator switch bringing in Jim Knowles in 2022 who has built perhaps the nation’s best defense this season and Chip Kelly, whose offense indeed must get better, but has many of the tools to do so. All of those things were done in good faith. Up until Saturday night, the results simply hadn’t followed.
A wise former Alabama coach would tell you that it’s the process that is the most important to building a championship program. This season felt title-or-bust coming into it for Ohio State, but bust does not have to mean you turn the entire organization over and start fresh. And a title is well within play.