Even before the confetti began to fall inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Monday night, a narrative had already begun to shape regarding Ohio State’s national championship victory over Notre Dame. Long story short: Ryan Day had proven the doubters wrong.
Admittedly, I was one of those doubters.
I didn’t think he could win the big game. I didn’t think he was cut from the same cloth that proven national champions Jim Tressel and Urban Meyer were. Quite frankly, I thought he was underqualified for what I — a slightly biased Columbus native and Ohio State alum — consider to be one of the two best jobs in all of college football. And in my even more biased opinion, it’s not 2.
If you’re asking if I feel stupid right now, the answer is yes. So much so that I donated to Day’s charity on Monday night in a desperate attempt to atone for skepticism as I prepared to celebrate the third Buckeyes national title of my lifetime. And despite my charitable efforts, it’s still not lost on me that I’m a part of the “you” in the “we told you so” Nike banners currently adorning my alma mater’s campus.
GOOD MORNING COLUMBUS‼️ pic.twitter.com/2dRXXdp2wv
— Ohio State Buckeyes 🌰 (@OhioStAthletics) January 21, 2025
But in my meager defense, I was hardly alone. And it wasn’t just the so-called “lunatic fringe” of the Ohio State fanbase calling for Day’s job following the Buckeyes’ loss to a lowly Michigan team last November, but even some of the most optimistic and blindly loyal fans I know.
“Should Ohio State fire Ryan Day?” wasn’t just a made-up TV talking point, but a real conversation people were having about the state of the Buckeyes program following a fourth straight loss in college football’s most storied rivalry. Kirk Herbstreit wasn’t wrong when he suggested that Ohio State needed to get off to a fast start in its first-round matchup against Tennessee if it wanted to avoid boobirds at Ohio Stadium.
And yet here we are less than two months later with Day not only on top of the college football world but well positioned to become the first Buckeyes head coach to win multiple national championships since Woody Hayes did it in the 1970s.
How did we get here? Truth be told, the journey might say more about the new era of college football than it does Ohio State.
$20 million later
While my skepticism of Day was solidified following the Buckeyes’ fourth straight loss to Michigan this past November, it truly began to form somewhere within the first three losses to the Wolverines from 2021-2023.
In my 30-plus years of following college football, I’ve seen just about every blue blood program rise and fall; Texas, Miami, USC, Michigan, Notre Dame, Florida, Florida State, Alabama, you name it. Ohio State even experienced a speed bump transitioning from the end of John Cooper’s tenure to the start of Jim Tressel’s in the early-2000s.
Although it quickly became clear that Jim Harbaugh wasn’t long for Ann Arbor as he led the Wolverines to last season’s national title, there was a part of me that wondered whether the Buckeyes’ two-decade-long was up. In college football, momentum is everything — at least it feels that way. And it was hard to find much positive energy working in Ohio State’s favor early last winter as Michigan had not established itself as the Big Ten’s dominant program but won its first national championship since the Clinton administration.
And yet, despite Ohio State facing what would have been its first rebuilding year since 2004 with a roster full of players who appeared headed for the NFL Draft, something unexpected happened: they all decided to stay.
They wanted to beat Michigan. They wanted to win a national title. And oh yeah, the advent of the NIL era meant that they could be compensated for doing so and it’s not a coincidence that the Buckeyes’ fundraising efforts surged in the wake of the Wolverines winning their first national title in more than a quarter-century.
Not only did Ohio State manage to dissuade the likes of Jack Sawyer, Emeka Egbuka, TreVeyon Henderson, Donovan Jackson, J.T. Tuimoloau, and Denzel Burke from entering the draft, but reinforced its roster via the transfer portal with high-profile additions like quarterback Will Howard, running Quinshon Judkins, safety Caleb Downs and offensive lineman Seth McLaughlin. Factor in a recruiting class headlined by all-universe wide receiver Jeremiah Smith, and Ohio State’s 2024 roster reportedly cost $20 million — the most expensive in the sport’s history.
The Buckeyes were heading for a rebuild, alright. But true to college football’s new landscape, they didn’t have to wait for the season to start for it to take place.
Rather, Ohio State used all of its newfound available avenues to fix its most glaring weaknesses and supercharge its roster in a way that would not have been possible pre-transfer portal or NIL.
Moral of story for College Football.
Spend $20 Million on your roster.— Robert Griffin III (@RGIII) January 21, 2025
That’s right, RGIII. Perhaps more programs should follow suit.
Second — and third — chances
Whenever I found myself in an argument regarding the job Day was doing in Columbus — especially on the last weekend of November the last four years — I inevitability heard about his overall record, which is currently an inarguably impressive 70-10.
My trump card, however, was always that Ohio State football has three self-stated goals each season: Beat Michigan, win the Big Ten, and win the national title. And by the end of 2024, you’d have to go back to 2020 to find the last time the Buckeyes had won their conference and a year further back than that for the last time they had beaten their arch-rival.
From there, the national championship part of the equation was academic.
Or, at least it used to be.
Before 2014, the idea of Ohio State winning a national championship without beating Michigan or winning the Big Ten wouldn’t have even been a consideration. And even in the 10-year run of the four-team playoff, such situations proved to be exceedingly rare, with the Buckeyes making the playoff just once (2022) in a season that they lost to the Wolverines.
But with the College Football Playoff expanding to 12 teams, such scenarios might not just happen more frequently now, they’ll likely prove common. Even after losing to a Michigan team that it was favored by nearly three touchdowns over, there was never a question of whether Ohio State would still make the playoff or not. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight, the Buckeyes likely benefitted from avoiding having to play in the Big Ten Championship Game that a win over the Wolverines would have clinched.
Make no mistake, Ohio State’s path through the playoff was hardly a cakewalk. But while the Buckeyes earned their No. 8 seed via regular-season losses to Oregon and Michigan, there wasn’t any question as to who college football’s best team was by halftime of their quarterfinal matchup against the Ducks in the Rose Bowl.
Under any of college football’s previous postseason formats, Ohio State’s loss to the Wolverines would have instantly killed its national title aspirations. Instead, the Buckeyes didn’t just get a second (or third) chance at a championship thanks to the 12-team playoff — they made the most of it.
As it became increasingly clear that winning the national championship was inevitable, many Ohio State fans — myself included — found themselves thinking about Cooper, the coach Day had most frequently been compared to throughout his Buckeyes career. Like Day, Cooper was a great recruiter with an impressive regular season against the teams Ohio State is supposed to beat. He just couldn’t get over the hump of beating Michigan, with his 2-10-1 record against the Wolverines ultimately defining his Hall of Fame career.
How many national titles would Cooper have won in the playoff era, especially once it expanded to 12 teams? We’ll never know. And that’s not even the point.
The point is that this season marked the arrival of a new era of college football, in more ways than one. And anybody who doesn’t adjust their analysis and expectations accordingly is doomed to appear as wrong as I did on Monday night.
