At this point, there's an article for virtually every permutation of "it's Ryan Day's first year as a head football coach" that you could possibly imagine. Ever since his hiring was made official, sports writers like me (well, like me, but you know... good) have tried to figure out how to talk about him in various and sundry ways as a coach that sound different, but the national media articles mostly boil down to "uhhh well he's not Urban Meyer, how about that?"
I genuinely believe that we at 11W and a lot of the other local outlets are putting in great work (Dan and Colin have been killing it), but the wider national audience simply doesn't care about nuance.
Which: fine! There is very little data here to work with! You can only write so many articles about three games as an interim head coach and the ostensible director of a badass passing attack. Repetitiveness is kind of baked-in to the giant gaping maw that is Writing For An Internet Audience.
What genuinely kind of sucks about this are that the things that make Ryan Day an interesting person (his work with advocating awareness of mental health issues, for example), are written about but not truly explored in favor of other stuff like daily recruiting updates or silly articles like this one. And the biggest reason is that hell, this is sports! The closer we get to actual factual Ohio State football, the more that will necessarily take center stage. Like everyone else, I'm pretty pumped too, and I've made my peace with the fact that nobody outside of this site and maybe two others are super ready to read or write a multi-week analysis on the state of mental health advocacy programs within college football right before Lane Kiffin comes to town and the ball kicks off.
But please, fellow media, a simple request from a tired man: stop it with the incredibly bad Ryan Day puns.
I accept that sometimes we have to repeat the same pablum about "making the job his own" and "keeping expectations high" and spend hundreds of words comparing and contrasting every other Ohio State coach that's ever even glanced at a football with Ryan Day. What I cannot abide is our performative nervous tic of inserting the phrase "Brand New Day" into our internet smatterings every freaking chance we get.
Aside from being a pun, the absolute lowest form of humor ever conceived by man, making a "Brand New Day" joke might as well be a giant flashing neon sign that says "YOU'VE ALREADY SEEN EIGHT VERSIONS OF THIS ARTICLE, DO NOT READ."
Article after article after article after tweet after tweet after article after tweet after article and holy good Lord in heaven you get the idea here has ground this complete non-joke into a flavorless paste to be smeared over the Buckeye net-o-sphere until there's a thin film of grease over all of our computers that'll be there until the final time it is said.
In short, it's lazy, and representative of the kind of coverage of Ryan Day that we (as the media) shouldn't resort to and you (as people reading what we write and report on) should demand less of.
Ohio State fans and reporters have been given an absolute gift in Ryan Day and the 2019 Ohio State football team; a coach that's both effectively a tabula rasa, bringing with him none of the baggage in terms of history and record that a guy like Urban Meyer did, and a relatively media-friendly presence who we're hoping might end up providing new and interesting angles into what makes the football team tick.
We also have a team with some potential national stars that are relatively unknown to many casual fans, giving us a chance to learn more about their personal stories. I can't guarantee that Eleven Warriors has been and will remain pun-free in the lead up to this season finally kicking off, but I can promise that our guys will make sure that we won't get sucked into the day-to-day grind of repetitious stories and reporting, especially with an upcoming season like this one.
Or, alternatively, we could just lean right into it and ride the pun train straight to hell. "A scarlet letter Day." "A cold Day in Hell." "All in a Day's work." "Seize the Day." Go ahead, make my Day." "Every dog has its Day." "THE ICEMAN COMETH!" "Day by Day." "Another Day, another dollar." "Don't quit your Day job." "Rome wasn't built in a Day."
But "New Day?" Well, that one has about run its course. Because it's football time, dammit! Let's make sure we're paying close attention.
