"I'm not here to make friends."– Kelly Wiglesworth, Survivor, Season One
Rarely has a fanbase's impatience paid off as quickly and as well as it did for Ohio State at the end of the 2021 college football season.
"The defense is bad! Fix it!" we howled in the direction of the Woody Hayes Athletic Center, rending our Buckeye hoodies asunder in a fit of pique. "Damn you, Ryan Day! Fix it now!"
And... he did. Ryan Day went out and hired Jim Knowles from Oklahoma State, widely thought to be one of the best defensive minds in college football. They then plucked one of Knowles' starting safeties out of the transfer portal to help him complete his scheme, and (perhaps surprisingly) ended up firing offensive line coach Greg Studrawa, who oversaw a unit that underachieved at times in 2021. "At times" being the operative phrase here, because damn, they were still pretty good most of the time. But not consistently great, which is the point.
These are aggressive moves in the vein of a seasoned general manager, not a still very young head coach coming off just his second full season as head coach at Ohio State.
It's jarring, but in a good way.
We like to joke about how Urban Meyer hired his best man at his wedding to be his linebacker's coach, or how he kept Zach Smith on staff despite numerous indiscretions that Meyer somehow stayed blissfully unaware of over the course of many, many years, but instead of making hilarious wisecracks, let's just call it what it looks like: an acute case of nepotism. And, I guess, that, coupled with the arrogance necessary to convince yourself that you can make some extremely dumb hires and just kind of roll with it because you kick just that much ass. This worked for Meyer for exactly as long as it was going to and not one second longer in the college ranks, and then not at all in the NFL.
But it's easy to see the allure! Given how utterly complete and humiliating his failure was in Jacksonville, you'd be forgiven if this escaped your memory, but Urban Meyer is still one of the most successful college football coaches in history. When not actively sowing discord among his own team and staff, Meyer was very very very good at his job in lots of ways, and won lots of games and championships. Why the hell shouldn't he be able to blindly throw darts at pictures of wedding attendees to make critical hiring choices? He beat the Oklahoma Sooners in a championship game, you think just anybody can do that?
Urban Meyer also beat Jim Tressel, a man who never stubbornly stuck with a bad hiring decision, with the exception of that time he let a walrus who saved his life while bodysurfing off the Alaskan coast be his offensive coordinator for a whole-ass decade. Of course, hiring the occasional incompetent boob every so often also gave Tressel the leeway to be the kind of micromanager he relished being, but again: he was very very very good at it. As with Meyer, it worked until it didn't.
Also pictured: some random guys no one remembers.
It's possible that Ryan Day has the same kind of emotional attachment to incompetent douchebags and creatures of the sea that his predecessors sometimes did, but if so we haven't seen it. More likely is that Day understands that college football in 2022 is much more transactional than what it was even five years ago, and that unless he's willing to believe that his genius can shoulder the burden of the failure of others, he needs to make sure that he has the staff required to win national championships.
Michigan football went through exactly this a year ago. Faced with a stagnant program and boosters out for blood, Jim Harbaugh took a gigantic pay cut and hired a bunch of hotshot coaches to help save his job. And it worked, in that the Wolverines finally beat Ohio State after a decade of trying and won the Big Ten for the first time since 2004. It only took seven years of the Jim Harbaugh experience for Michigan to reach the semi-promised land. Their fans, faces and hands greasy from eating a giant glazed ham of success, spent a month extremely high on their own supply.
Then Michigan got annihilated by Georgia in the playoff, lost their best defensive players to the draft (without clear replacements for them in 2022), and Harbaugh is reportedly testing the waters of the NFL again.
C'est la vie! Must be tough being a fan of a program without a clear plan for sustained success. I wouldn't know.
Of course, that's the optimistic way of looking at it because, alternatively, maybe Day stops here. Maybe underperforming guys like Kerry Coombs and Al Washington continue to be gainfully employed at Ohio State longer than they should, or maybe they're shuffled to other positional responsibilities to maximize their coaching abilities. And hell, maybe Day himself takes a long, wistful glance at the Bears. So it'll be interesting to see when Ryan Day decides he's finished shuffling the deck, and whether or not that matches up with the expectations from Buckeye fans.
All of this drama is what a two-loss year will do to a team with expectations of playing for a national championship every season, and the fun part will be watching the Buckeyes evolve into something different and hopefully even better.
