Going into his second season as Ohio State’s head football coach, Ryan Day is facing some very different challenges than he had to face in his first year leading the program.
After holding just three practices before spring break, Ohio State is facing the possibility of being unable to resume spring practices this year, as all organized team activities have been suspended by the Big Ten through at least April 6. At this point, it’s uncertain when the team will even be allowed to return to the Woody Hayes Athletic Center, as Ohio State has also closed all of its athletic facilities until further notice due to the coronavirus outbreak.
That leaves the potential for Day and his staff to have to make substantial adjustments in their preparation for the season. While there are still nearly six months until the Sept. 5 season opener against Bowling Green, spring practices are a crucial time for players to develop and for coaches to evaluate their players and install new plays and packages, and now the Buckeyes might only be able to complete 20 percent of them.
Given that they aren’t allowed to hold any team workouts for the time being, it’s likely that Mickey Marotti and Ohio State’s strength and conditioning staff will also have to find a way to make up for lost time in order to get their players in playing shape for the season.
Day has had to guide the Buckeyes through adversity before, though, having served as their acting head coach during Urban Meyer’s suspension in 2018. And while the circumstances Ohio State is facing now could be even more challenging from a football perspective, they are circumstances that football teams all over the country are going to have to adapt to. All five Power 5 conferences have currently suspended organized team activities, so unless that changes, Day and the Buckeyes won’t be idling at a competitive disadvantage for now.
No matter how the next few months unfold and when the Buckeyes are able to get back to business as normal, Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith is confident Day, his staff and his players will be adequately prepared for the start of the season.
“Fortunately, Ryan’s extremely talented, and he’s got an experienced staff,” Smith said Friday in a conference call with reporters. “We will have to come up with a strategy, particularly when we’re allowed, to have team activities in the strength and conditioning space to make sure that we help our young men get back to where they were. Fortunately, we do have very mature players, they know how to work out on their own, they know the proper training techniques.”
Smith said he and deputy athletics director Diana Sabau, who serves as the primary sport administrator for football, have been in constant communication with Day over the past week as the situation has unfolded. They haven’t had a chance to sit down and talk strategy with Day yet, but plan to do that soon, and Smith said he has had two conference calls with all of Ohio State’s head coaches and will have another with them on Monday to help them navigate through the unexpected circumstances.
In the meantime, Smith expects Day to maintain a consistent line of communication with his team – even though players have been encouraged to stay home, as Ohio State has moved all of its classes online for the rest of the semester, until team activities are allowed to resume.
“He will continue to communicate with his coaches, they’ll continue to communicate with their student-athletes – probably, knowing them, on a daily basis – to make sure that they’re all right and communicating with them,” Smith said. “So I think Ryan and his staff, like all of our coaches, will spend a great deal of time talking to our student-athletes digitally, trying to make sure they stay on track.”
“Fortunately, Ryan’s extremely talented, and he’s got an experienced staff.”– Gene Smith on his confidence in Ohio State football coach Ryan Day
Day won’t be able to hold any in-person team meetings for the time being, and he won’t be able to meet with recruits in person either, as the Big Ten has placed a moratorium on all on-campus recruiting visits and off-campus recruiting travel “for the foreseeable future.” The NCAA put a recruiting dead period in place until April 15, a move Smith was glad to see made to ensure competitive equity across all conferences.
Smith would also like the NCAA to place a national guideline for suspending or canceling organized team activities to ensure that everyone is playing by the same rules until it is safe for team activities to resume. That said, Smith said Ohio State was already in the process of putting together its own policy to suspend team activities before the Big Ten stepped in, and he and several of his Big Ten colleagues thought it would be smart to cancel all organized team activities through the remainder of the academic year.
If the Big Ten allows organized team activities to resume after April 6 – as of now, the conference plans to re-evaluate the situation and make a decision at that time – then Ohio State will determine to best resume spring football practices. As of now, Smith isn’t exactly sure how that would work. The Buckeyes were scheduled to hold their final four spring practices between April 6-11, including their now-canceled spring game, and NCAA rules dictate that all spring practices must be held within a 34-day window (not including spring break). It’s unknown at this time whether the NCAA will pass temporary legislation to allow teams to continue spring practices outside of that window or start preseason camp early to make up for the practices they are losing.
Given the uncertainty of how long the coronavirus outbreak will last, they’re going to have to be patient and prepared to adapt.
“We will see how this rolls, and somewhere along the line, we’ll have to make a decision that after that, there will be no more organized team activities or there will be,” Smith said. “I guess technically we’d probably be able to get in like five or six practices (if team activities resume on April 6), I have no clue, I haven’t thought that far. But the decision was to allow for us to kind of evaluate as things go on.”
Ohio State held three spring practices from March 2-6, but it's uncertain whether the Buckeyes will be able to hold any more this year.
While the possibility of spring practices being canceled altogether still looms large, preseason camp is still over four months away, which everyone hopes will be enough time for COVID-19 to subside so that people in all walks of life, including college athletes, can get back to their normal routines. Smith said he hasn’t given any thought to the possibility that the 2020 football season could be in jeopardy, because that’s simply too far ahead on the calendar to be thinking about right now.
“We have issues on the ground floor today that we’re trying to deal with,” Smith said. “So we just got a million other things that we’re thinking about.”
Whenever Ohio State football does return to the field, its preparation for its first game will be altered by the time the Buckeyes haven’t been able to work together this offseason, and the leadership of Day, Marotti and the rest of the staff will be as crucial as ever to mitigating the potential negative effects of that time away. But this isn’t the first time the Buckeyes have had to overcome unanticipated challenges in recent years, and Smith believes they will do what they need to do once again to have a chance at another successful football season.
“I think at the end of the day, we’ll be able to get our guys back up on track and be competitive in the fall,” Smith said.
