Great podcast from 3rd & 33, titled “Day of Broken Dreams”. It goes through how it all went so wrong for Ohio State on Saturday and previews the conference championship games. Linking full episode and also sharing the transcript of the Ohio State segment below.
Transcript:
Ohio State's head football coach just stood there, not saying a word, looking defeated, probably reflecting on how he could have lost his arch rival with such an amazing group of players. Just a few hours before, few people outside the Michigan football program thought this result was even possible. Ohio State had been nearly a 20 point favorite.
As the seconds ticked down in Ann Arbor, the Michigan fans counted down with them. Five, they roared. Four, three, two, one. And the student body began to pour onto the field. The Wolverines hoisted their first year head coach in the air to celebrate their historic upset.
Now, if the details of that don't sound quite right, it's because I'm not actually talking about last Saturday. I'm talking about 1969. The Ohio State head coach was Woody Hayes, the Michigan coach, Bo Schembechler. Michigan had beaten the undefeated and defending national champion Buckeyes 24-12.
Ohio State had crushed every team on their schedule that season by an average score of 46-9. They had All-Americans all over the field, but they'd just fallen to a three-loss Michigan team that they had dominated in Columbus the previous year. Now, Woody Hayes wasn't a perfect football coach, but it didn't take him long to grasp what had gone wrong.
For starters, the Buckeyes were overconfident, in part because Woody Hayes had strayed from one of his core principles, never ever feel too good about yourself. And throughout the season, he'd consistently praised his team to the press, hyping their talent and calling Ohio State's defense the best in the program's history.
Hayes also saw that his former assistant Bo Schembechler had prepared his team well. Bo had installed Ohio State's defensive scheme at Michigan, and large parts of his own offense could practice against it every week. Schembechler's team was well conditioned from his grueling offseason workouts. They were also completely unafraid of Ohio State, and they had a great game plan that kept the Buckeye defense on its heels for the entire first half.
But there was one thing that cost Ohio State worst of all. Woody Hayes loved running the football. He would say over and over again, “three things can happen when you throw and two of them are bad”.
His teams were built on a simple run game, designed to first wear out and then overpower opponents. But in 1969, with so much talent on the roster, he'd thrown the ball a little bit more than usual. Against Michigan, Ohio State put the ball in the air 28 times. A remarkably high number for a Woody Hayes coached team. Just 10 of those passes were caught by Buckeyes. Six of them were caught by Wolverines.
And as the Michigan fans stormed the field, Woody Hayes realized that more than anything else, he'd lost by playing someone else's game.
Last Saturday, Ryan Day and Ohio State lost to Michigan for the 4th straight season. 13 to 10. This time as 20-point favorites.
I focused all of last week's episode on the game, on its history, and I did a pretty in-depth preview of Saturday's game. And I went back and listened to it, and there's a lot that I got right.
I talked about the long history of mediocre Michigan teams playing their best game of the year against Ohio State. And I thought that they would do just that on Saturday. “and cover the spread. I thought Michigan could limit Ohio State's run game and create problems for the interior of Ohio State's offensive line, and they did exactly that.
I thought Michigan would struggle to move the football, but I also thought that Kalel Mullings, their running back, presented some real challenges for Ohio State. And Ohio State largely held the Michigan offense in check until late in the fourth quarter when Mullings broke free for a big game. But there's one thing I got very, very wrong, that Ohio State had the right mindset to win this game.
In 2017, Urban Meyer brought Ryan Day to Columbus to revive an offense that had just been shut out by Clemson in a college football playoff game. Day was a confident coach. He was an aggressive coach.
He loved to throw the football and he loved to play with tempo. And as offensive coordinator and later as head coach, Ryan Day fielded some of the most formidable offenses in the country.
And I ended last week's show by talking about Will Howard, Ohio State starting quarterback, about his comments after the Indiana game. And as I saw it, he said all the right things. He talked about how important the rivalry is, how he wanted to win it for his coach and his teammates, especially for the seniors who came back for one last shot at beating Michigan. But in that press conference, there was a warning sign, a second message from Will Howard that should have set alarm bells off across Ohio. Will Howard was wearing a baseball cap with four words — Run the damn ball.
Ohio State won the game eight years in a row, from 2012 to 2019. And they did it largely by out recruiting Michigan and then finding creative ways to get their superior athletes the ball in space.
But on Saturday, Ryan Day, for the second time in three years, approved a game plan that looked like it was more about proving a point about how tough his team was than it was about scoring points and winning the game.
On Saturday, Ohio State ran 59 offensive plays over 10 drives. On just one of those drives, the two-minute drill before half time, did Ohio State go up tempo and lean heavily on their pass game. And on that drive, Ohio State scored its only touchdown of the game. On the other nine drives, Ohio State threw it just 24 times and ran it 25 times. Often directly at Michigan's two all-American defensive tackles, Mason Graham and Kenneth Grant. They showed a little interest in using their wide receivers to push the ball down field, or in finding creative ways to get them the ball in space with screens or jet sweeps.
And since Ryan Day lost in Ann Arbor in 2021, a loss that snapped Ohio State's eight-game win streak in the rivalry, it seems that he's been obsessed with toughness. And after that game in 2021, Michigan offensive coordinator said of Ryan Day's team, “they're a good team, they're a finesse team, they're not a tough team.”
And it really feels like Ryan Day has spent the last three years trying to prove Gattis wrong, to prove that Ohio State really is a tough team. The problem is that his idea of toughness plays directly into Michigan's hands. It's toughness on Michigan's terms, being able to run the ball inside and stopping the interior run game.
We saw the disastrous results of this in 2022, when Ryan Day decided to stack the box and prove that his rebuilt defense was tough enough to stop the run. Michigan ran 65 plays that day. 60 of those plays yielded just 181 yards, barely 3 yards per play.
But the overaggressiveness backfired horribly. The other 5 yielded touchdowns of 69, 75, 45, 75, and 85 yards. All of this from an offense that had struggled to generate explosive plays and had to claw back in the 4th quarter the week before to beat Illinois 19 to 17.
This time, he decided to prove that he could run the ball inside. Again, it backfired horribly. With 3 five-star receivers on the field, probably all of whom will be first round draft picks, Ohio State ran it inside 19 times for 18 total yards. They ran off tackle 6 times for 44 yards, and they ran just one speed option play to the outside for a 15-yard gain. Ohio State scored as many points on Michigan on Saturday as Fresno State did to open the season.
And after the game, as chaos ensued, with Ohio State's marching band playing in the alma mater, and Buckeyes and Wolverines clashing at midfield, Ryan Day looked catatonic, just staring off into space, probably reflecting on what had gone wrong, and hopefully, for Ohio State's sake, realizing the same thing that Woody Hayes realized over 50 years before, that he'd lost by playing someone else's game.
Now until Saturday, I figured that Ohio State kept losing to Michigan because they weren't focused enough on the rivalry, that the players and coaches weren't treating the game with the proper reverence. Saturday changed my mind. Ohio State is too focused on this game. They're too intense about it. It distorts their vision of how to win it. In the days leading up to the game, Ohio State players and coaches said what seemed to be all the right things, that this game is war, that it's a way of life, that they can never ever lose this game again.
But on Saturday, they looked like a team that was crumbling under the weight of that intensity and that expectation. And it probably doesn't help when your head coach says to the press that losing the game is one of the worst things that's ever happened to him in his entire life. Ohio State looked terrified of losing. They looked terrified of making mistakes.
Michigan, to their credit, looked loose and confident. They looked ready to come out and play their best football on every play and hope that without a downfield passing attack, they could still keep it close enough for long enough for Ohio State to collapse under the weight of the pressure.
Now, in fairness, Michigan was playing with House Money after winning this game 3 years in a row and taking the National Championship last season. But Michigan is clearly approaching the rivalry in a way that's conducive to playing good football in the game.
And maybe that's it. At the end of the day, The Game is just a game. When it's talked about is something more that's about preparation. Woody Hayes spent an entire year formulating his game plan for 1970 after the humbling loss in 1969.
Preparation around this game needs to be more thoughtful. It needs to be more intense, because the other team is going to bring it. But at the end of the day, the 60 minutes of football do need to be approached like football. With creativity, with aggressiveness, and with a strategy built around winning the game. Not winning it a certain way, not proving how tough you are, not settling old scores, and not proving narratives wrong.
After the game, I saw a tweet from former Ohio State Offensive lineman LeCharles Bentley. He played in the final dark years of the John Cooper era, and he also played on Jim Tressel’s first team in 2001. The one that beat Michigan 26-20 in Ann Arbor, and flipped the rivalry in Ohio State's favor. Bentley said that the difference between Tressel and Cooper was that Tressel made the game a priority.
But he also said something really interesting. He said that Tressel never played into hatred of Michigan. It was always about loving and honoring Ohio State.
He said that the brilliance of Jim Tressel was that he made the team love what it means to wear the scarlet and gray. It wasn't about fighting to win one game. It was about appreciating the history of the program, appreciating the history of the rivalry, and loving Ohio State so much that you couldn't imagine embarrassing the legacy of the players and coaches who came before. I think Ryan Day needs to lean into that. Because the current approach just isn't working. And it's only going to get harder from here.
Michigan just signed their best recruiting class since 2017. Because of the certainty they have on their coaching staff, they're going to be able to use the transfer portal much more effectively this offseason than they were able to last offseason. Ohio State is losing a bunch of seniors, and they're likely to have serious offensive line issues again next season.
Not to mention, Michigan will host the game in Ann Arbor. Ohio State one way or another needs to find a more effective approach to this game, or they will continue to lose to their biggest rival.
