The incredible rush of the Natty is still alive in our home, and yet what's flooring me today is realizing that Ryan Day is only six years into his first head coaching gig. For all my criticisms of him over the years, he was achieving at an incredible level despite learning how to be a head man.

At this point in his career, Jim Tressel was a Div 1AA Youngstown State coach with just three winning seasons in the previous five under his belt. He took home his first 1AA title on that sixth year, and the rest of his Hall of Fame career is history. Urban Meyer, going into his sixth season, had two overachieving Bowling Green squads, two overachieving Utah teams, and a Florida team that had just won the Outback Bowl to get to 9-3. He won the Natty his sixth year, and the rest of his Hall of Fame career is history. Even Woody Hayes, the greatest of all Buckeyes, had a resume consisting of three seasons at Denison and two seasons at Miami OH (only one of which was better than 5-4). On year six, he took the helm of the Scarlet and Gray and went 4-3-2. The rest of his Hall of Fame career is history.

Haters will say that none of the aforementioned coaches had the same advantages that Ryan Day has had in inheriting the majority of Meyer's infrastructure, and they wouldn't be wrong. But Day has also had to live in one of the harshest spotlights in all of sports, his every move under a microscope, while his predecessors had a chance to hone their craft in relative anonymity where the stakes were not so high. If Day was born on third base, he had to steal home on a field made of molten lava.

All this to say that I'm incredibly grateful to have witnessed the incredible ascent to the pinnacle for this incredible man, and to have gotten to see him grow as a coach. However the remainder of his career goes, Coach Day has forever etched himself into the hallowed grounds of the Horseshoe and joined the fraternity of elite Buckeyes.