Ryan Day found himself swimming in uncharted waters at the end of the 2022 season.
The Buckeye head coach had already suffered a rivalry loss to Michigan a year prior, and a College Football Playoff loss was nothing new, either. Before the Peach Bowl, Ohio State previously came up short in two CFP contests during Day’s tenure. But never before as head coach of the Buckeyes, nor at any point since he joined Ohio State’s coaching staff in 2017, had Day experienced back-to-back defeats. The last time a football team lost two in a row with Day on staff, he was still a position coach in the NFL, multiple seasons before his full-time head coaching opportunity.
The nature of those losses was even more disheartening. November’s home loss to Michigan was Ohio State’s first in 22 years, and Day became the first head coach of the program since John Cooper to lose two straight games to its archenemy. And although the Buckeyes returned to form in many regards against Georgia, the consolation of an impressive performance against the powerhouse Bulldogs was hardly enough to cloak the disappointment of a national championship opportunity lost.
“When you lose the last game of the regular season, it's devastating. It is,” Day said at Big Ten Media Days in Indianapolis on Wednesday. “And then you regroup and you swing as hard as you can against Georgia and come a play or two short. Again, one of those players goes another way, we're sitting here have a different conversation, but it didn't. So you have to trust the process.”
While the Georgia loss can be explained away by a couple of bad breaks for the Buckeyes, the same can’t be said about what took place on Nov. 26 in Columbus. For the second straight season, a loss to the Wolverines was made increasingly demoralizing by the wide margin of defeat. Following a 15-point Michigan win in 2021, home-field advantage and a plan for revenge only resulted in an even more lopsided contest in favor of the maize and blue this past year.
Day still laments some of the crucial moments that swung the momentum against Michigan, and although he doesn’t think the Buckeyes need to reinvent the wheel to turn the tide in the rivalry, he knows adjustments must be made so that history doesn’t continue to repeat itself.
“When you go back a little bit on that last game of the regular season, the rivalry game, we just didn't respond well in the second half when some of those big hits happened,” Day said. “And then we had that long penalty, the holding, and then the 15-yarder which was almost like a 50-yard penalty. We didn't respond great in the second half of that game. … It's something we talk about a lot, but we're not gonna change what we do and how we prepare. There's some things we talked about that we need to get done in that game, and I'm not gonna get into all those things now, but we have to.
“And so we looked long and hard at the whole game and figured out the areas that we've got to do a better job, specifically. But just the emphasis every day needs to be there.”
"We talk about it every day. We do. We're not going to sit there and let it beat us twice, but it is a motivating factor for sure.” – Ryan Day on losing to Michigan and Georgia
But Day believes a silver lining emerged out of the ashes of that defeat. Given a backdoor bid to the CFP despite coming up short in the regular-season finale and failing to play for a Big Ten championship, Ohio State had a new lease on life against the Bulldogs, and the shift in approach was evident on the field.
A loss is a loss, and even in an inspired effort in Atlanta, the Buckeyes couldn’t get the job done. But Day thinks the performance that followed the aforementioned change in attitude – from both his players and himself – served as a proof of concept for the mentality he hopes to carry over into the 2023 season.
“And I think coming into the Georgia game, we're like no matter what happens, we're just gonna swing and we're not gonna worry about 'what if' or anything like that. And so I think you felt that aggressiveness from all of us, including me,” Day said. “When you put so much into that game, like so many people do, and the minute it goes a little bit off-course, you have to just stick with it, you can't flinch. And so I think you felt that a little bit in the Georgia game. I felt that throughout the whole offseason. And now it's gonna continue against Indiana this year. And then build as the season goes on, because those games get bigger and bigger.”
Even if a lightbulb went off in the collective head of the Ohio State football program, that alone won’t right the wrongs of last season. But Day thinks a philosophical shift could aid the Buckeyes in getting over the hurdles they’ve failed to clear the past couple seasons, and that’s informed his approach to orchestrating offseason practice sessions and workouts.
To that end, Day is stressing head-to-head competition more than ever before as a means to coax an extra edge out of the Buckeyes, and one he thinks will pay dividends when Ohio State faces its toughest opposition in the most important games. And while Day has been careful not to fixate on last season’s losses too deeply, he said they’re helping to drive the improvement he knows his team must make this offseason.
“It started off with the way the regular season ended, and then that whole bowl prep leading up to it. There was just a lot of focus, a lot of conversation about making sure that we finish the season the right way, and we came up a couple plays short. That was not easy to do,” Day said. “As you replay a few plays here, a few plays there, really in both of those games, it's motivating. Everything we did in the offseason was about competing because, when you're in matchup games, it comes down to a handful of plays. There are times during the season where that's not the case. We can maybe lose a few plays and still win by a few touchdowns. It's like sometimes that can get unnoticed. Not that it does get unnoticed, but sometimes you don't feel the severity of it until you lose a game like that.
“We've been working hard this offseason to make sure that doesn't happen again, that in every game, no matter who we're playing, we understand that it can come down to a couple plays. Certainly in matchup games, we've got to win those games. Explosive plays certainly is what really was our Achilles heel going down to those last two games. We know that. We've talked about it. How much do we talk about the rivalry game and winning at the end of the season? We talk about it every day. We do. We're not going to sit there and let it beat us twice, but it is a motivating factor for sure.”
As much as the back-to-back Michigan losses and the lack of a national title have contributed to a cynical view of Day’s tenure in Columbus thus far, he said the Buckeye program is “as healthy as it's ever been.” In order for the masses to believe that statement, though, a resilient 2023 in the games that matter most will be required in the season to come, whether the scars of last season help them get there or not.
