Ryan Day Unconcerned About Big Ten’s Struggles on Long Road Trips This Season

Through the first six weeks of the college football season, Big Ten teams are just 2-10 – with a 1-8 record in conference games – when they’ve had to travel across two time zones or more to play a road game this season. UCLA earned a victory in its non-conference season opener at Hawaii, while Indiana earned a 42-13 win over UCLA at the Rose Bowl in Week 3; since then, Big Ten teams have lost 10 straight games after traveling two or more time zones.

Ohio State will need to buck that trend if it is to earn a victory over Oregon after traveling more than 2,000 miles on Friday to play at Autzen Stadium on Saturday night. But Ryan Day doesn’t view the extra travel time as an overly difficult hurdle for his team to overcome.

“I don't really see it as much of a challenge that way,” Day said Tuesday. “I think it's a four-and-a-half-hour flight. It's a couple hours more than Nebraska. And we're going to stay on East Coast time, and I think we've got a good plan. We're going to stay on our time schedule, and the time of the game and everything fits kind of how we practice. So we're not going to look too much into it … Again, it's only a couple hours more than Nebraska. So that's kind of how we're looking at it and not making it a bigger deal than it is.”

The results other Big Ten teams have had after long road trips this season suggest it’s a challenge Ohio State shouldn’t overlook, not to mention some of the major upsets that have happened even in closer-to-home road games around the country, such as Alabama’s loss to Vanderbilt and Tennessee’s loss to Arkansas last week. But most if not all of the Big Ten teams that have lost road games this season aren’t of the same caliber as the Buckeyes, who enter this week’s game as the second-ranked team in the country. And among those teams that have lost those games, the only one who was a betting favorite entering any of those games was USC, who was favored against Michigan and Minnesota but lost both games; Ohio State is currently favored to beat Oregon by three to 3.5 points at most sportsbooks.

At the same time, third-ranked Oregon is also a higher-caliber opponent than most of the other teams who have won those games. And Autzen Stadium is known for being one of college football’s toughest places to play. The Ducks are 31-1 on their home field since the start of their 2019 season, suffering their only home loss in the last five years against Washington in 2022.

Few people know more about the power of playing in Autzen Stadium than OSU offensive coordinator Chip Kelly, who went 26-2 in home games as Oregon’s head coach from 2009-12. The road environment has the potential to impact Ohio State’s offense in particular, as Oregon will certainly encourage its fans to be loud when the Buckeyes have the ball in an effort to disrupt their communication, but Kelly thinks the Buckeyes need to focus more on how they match up with Oregon’s defense than worrying about the crowd noise.

“I think everywhere you go in this league, it's going to be loud. That's just the nature of it. The stadiums in the Midwest are gigantic. And I think this group has had a lot of experience playing in big stadiums,” Kelly said. “So I think no matter where we were going, whether it was to Autzen or to the Big House (Michigan) or up to Camp Randall (Wisconsin) or any place like that in between, you really don't concentrate on the stadium. You're really concentrating on the opponent, and you just turn the tape on and that will have your attention. It's about the Ohio State football players vs. the Oregon football players and it's not about the environment that you're playing in. It's about the game itself.”

Making a cross-country road trip during the regular season will be a new experience for the current Buckeyes as Ohio State – who has a 14-10-1 record all-time in regular-season games on the West Coast – has not played a regular-season game on the West Coast since 2013, when Urban Meyer’s Buckeyes earned a 52-34 win at Cal. But the Buckeyes have won all but two regular-season road games in Day’s tenure as head coach, with their only losses coming at Michigan in 2021 and 2023, and they got plenty of experience playing away from home last year with six regular-season road games, which he believes they can draw from this week.

“It's important to handle the environment. That’s a big part of it any time you go on the road, you got to handle that,” Day said. “We faced it a little bit at Michigan State (two weeks ago, when the Buckeyes beat Michigan State 38-7). So we're working on it hard and we'll work on it hard again this week.”

While he wasn’t at Ohio State last year, Buckeye quarterback Will Howard has plenty of experience playing on the road from his four years at Kansas State, including two starts at Texas among other Big 12 (or then-Big 12) schools. His results in those contests have been mixed – dating back to his freshman year at Kansas State in 2020, he’s just 6-9 as a starting quarterback in road games – but he believes the most important thing he needs to do to handle this week’s road test is prepare as diligently as possible while making sure he stays level-headed.

“For me, it's just preparing like I always do and trying to even maybe heighten, you know, how can I be better with my preparation this week? How can I work harder? How can I be the first one in, last one out every single day? Like, you know, maybe there's something extra I can do this week,” Howard said. “It's a big game, and you want to say that you don't want to treat any game more than another, but we know how big this one is, and we know it's a big matchup, and we're going to have to be on our stuff. So going into the game just being poised, being confident, and you just want to stay neutral, stay level-headed and be as prepared as you possibly can going into the game.”