This April will mark six years since the most recent Gold Pants ceremony.
That's an eternity in this rivalry. Ohio State has not been able to hold this formerly annual event since 2019, when it recognized the 2018 team for beating Michigan 62-39.
The following spring, commemorative jewelry was delivered via contact precautions, as every player was stuck at home along with the rest of the world. Since then, no Ohio State team has qualified for what used to be a grandfathered NCAA carve-out (gifting precious metals to players without a bowl game care package involved was an impermissible benefit for decades).
To put how long it's been since the Buckeyes were allowed to celebrate beating Michigan, the speaker at the most recent Gold Pants ceremony was Urban Meyer.
His final team was the recipient back in 2019. Urban's speech from that session went viral here and that's been the sustained memory of Ohio State players getting their ceremonial bling.
But he did not kick off those festivities, since it was no longer his program. The Buckeyes were being run by Ryan Day that April, and he opened that Gold Pants event by attempting to describe how it all began. This is verbatim:
Francis Schmidt started this tradition back in the 1930s. And he started it because they had a hard time beating the Team Up North, and he told them they put on their pants the same way they did.
I was in the room and bristled at how he had fumbled one of Ohio's greatest chronicles.
First of all, had a hard time beating the Team Up North isn't accurate. Ohio State and Michigan had split the six games prior to Schmidt's hiring in 1934, oddly both going 1-2 at home over that stretch. But an era of futility Day clumsily referred to was still fresh in the minds of the people who had lived through it.
Beating Michigan has always been the most important thing in Ohio. In 1934, Ohioans had first-hand memories of WWI, Titanic sinking, the stock market crash and worst of all, Fielding Yost. But winning two of three in Ann Arbor and splitting the past six years - again, an eternity in this rivalry - isn't exactly having a hard time beating them.
So the rivalry was competitive when Schmidt arrived. He was a postbellum novelty - the program's first-ever Southerner, he came from TCU to succeed Sam Willaman 69 years after 320,000 Union soldiers left Ohio to fight in the Civil War. The previous coaches had all been Ohioans or single-season rentals during the program's formative and club years.
Naturally, when Schmidt was introduced to everyone the locals had to ask him about the most important game on the schedule. He used a decidedly Texas expression to address the unwarranted mystique the media at the time was still giving the Michigan football program a full 15 years after Chic Harley had demystified the Wolverines in Ann Arbor:
those fellas put their pants on one leg at a time, the same as everyone else
Similar to how the movie The Bucket List popularized what until that point had been an uncommon expression, Schmidt using a saying which had never been heard north of Amarillo elevated it to broader syndication.
No one in Ohio was familiar with that saying. Pants! One leg at a time! Haha, listen to this guy! First it made the newspapers. Then it made the history books. Today everyone knows that expression, largely because 90 years ago Ohio State hired a guy from somewhere else.
Back in April of 2019, the 11th Ohio State head coach to follow Schmidt was cherry-picking historical bits and clumsily cobbling them together at a ceremony conceived in Texas and born out of a press conference. I don't think anyone else noticed or cared.
There's a very stubborn part of me that believes Ohio State's head coach should be an Ohio State football expert - not because trivia is fun and cool - but out of an abundance of self-preservation and sustainability. This is not a normal job, nor is it a particularly healthy one. Coal miners age more gracefully than Ohio State head football coaches.
Enough history has passed since Harley that a comprehensive repository of winning formulas, recipes for disaster and every single cautionary tale in between exists in American English on innumerable texts to explain exactly what being the archbishop of Ohio entails.
It's a job you take to your grave. The only uncertain details are the words on your epitaph.
You don't coach Ohio State and then do something else. That job title follows your name everywhere, followed by what at first appears to be a serial number: 16-11-1, 5-4, 2-10-1, 9-1 and 7-0 are recent and prominent examples.
It's really important to know that, because the Ohio State head coaching job is a dangerous game for confident men of all eras. Hell, Day was replacing a guy who was born to do it and then abruptly retired after just seven seasons.
Urban's predecessor had gotten himself fired, as had his predecessor. Same story for his predecessor as well as the guy before him - and that guy's name was on the building we were all standing inside of that April afternoon. That guy got fired.
And every single one of those terminated employees is enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame. So Ohio State isn't the kind of place you can fake being what the fans want, because they'll see right through it and devour your soul. It's a well-known workplace hazard.
One of those fired guys - John Cooper - had made a casual reference to his excitement about coaching his new team in Buckeye Stadium when he was hired. There are Ohioans who still resent him for that. Just calling the Horseshoe Buckeye Stadium was a red flag to them, and they weren't exactly wrong.
But ultimately they resent Coop for the stuff that took place during his tenure, mostly on cold November afternoons. I told myself to shrug off Day's flimsy comprehension of Gold Pants, that he meant well and that I was the problem - I was being one of those people who give Buckeye fans a less-than-pleasant reputation.
He was from New Hampshire and had just orchestrated a righteous demolition of a program which deserves no happiness or good feelings, ever. Day hastily looking up Gold Pants on Wikipedia or whatever and half-remembering what he read one time was probably harmless.
When he finished talking, the team watched a Gold Pants video. Then Day continued, emphasis added.
When I look at that (video) and I see the Gold Pants, I think about what that means to us now. We know (Michigan puts) their pants on the same way we do. We kick their ass. The way I think about it is, the way we put our pants on every day, we think about the rivalry - because the rivalry is what we live every single day.
And really where that started was the man in the back of the room. 7-0 against the Team Up North. Those are big shoes to fill, boys. Just telling you right now. And he created an environment where we live that every day in this program. And it’s who we are every day.
I bristled again. Does Ohio State's head coach really believe Urban started...all of this?
Maybe he just fumbled his words. Effusive praise for a former boss who had handed him a no-competition promotion to head coach of a recession-proof football program with inexhaustible resources - sure, flatter away. But there was no way Day believed Urban created the standard for beating Michigan. Right?
We were at the 40th Pants ceremony since Schmidt skipped town following the 1940 season (after he had lost to Michigan a third straight time and read the room, despite having just won the outright conference title the previous year) so suggesting any Michigan obsession began with Urban in the same breath as invoking Schmidt...ah, whatever.
Doesn't matter, I convinced myself. Ohio State had Michigan in a hell and the Wolverines would be doomed to stay there forever. Urban then gave this speech which went viral and whatever details Day fumbled about the program he was now in charge of vaporized and ascended into the WHAC auditorium ceiling tiles.
DAY would be a combination of Urban MEYER and Jim Tressel, a lethal mix of Knute Rockne and Fred Rogers which would continue to keep the conference in firm control.
Seven months later, the Buckeyes won by 29 in Ann Arbor, running the table for Ohio State's first perfect regular season since 2012. I forgot about the Pants fumble completely. We had our guy.
The handoff without a coaching search was justified and validated - this new coach would be a combination of Urban and Jim Tressel, a lethal mix of Knute Rockne and Fred Rogers which would continue to keep the conference in firm control.
Day would deliver a sophisticated, unduplicatable model of domination, altruism, winning righteously and beating opponents with brutality. As for the man himself, he had plenty of time to learn program history and precious details which matter far more to Ohioans than they have any right to. He would become One of Us in due time.
He could then properly revere Ohio State, rather than half-heartedly pretend to understand it. Day was so intelligent; he would certainly obtain all of the lessons from his predecessors, their powers, their triumphs and their cautionary tales. Certainly.
Ryan Day would be the most resourced and advantaged Ohio State coach in program history. If the previous two decades had felt like a golden era, the next two would be fully illuminated.
Michigan required divine intervention to beat Ohio State between 2001 and 2021. In 2024, the Wolverines don't even have to be good to beat the Buckeyes inside Ohio Stadium.
This season the Wolverines were in all likelihood on their way to a date with something called the Duke's Mayo Bowl, without any of their NFL-ready players choosing to participate. They were heading toward being winless on the road for the season as three-touchdown underdogs.
Michigan didn't resort to anything nefarious to beat Ohio State this time, nor does it appear it will need to do anything more sophisticated than simply showing up as long as Day is in charge of the Buckeyes.
For all of his obvious skill and ambition, Day's abbreviated career path to Columbus left him categorically deficient for handling the very specific head coaching and Ohio State-specific elements for the job he has. His most obvious deficiency is the least forgivable.
He does not understand how the rivalry works, which most fellow Ohioans chalk up to him being from somewhere else, like Schmidt 90 years ago. It's not like Ohio's Depression Era imported outsider had seen Yost's Wolverines on ESPN during the prior decade and could speak intelligently to his new stakeholders' obsession.
To Schmidt, he was just coaching ball somewhere a little colder, right up until he found out what his job really was. He took down Michigan four straight times to start his tenure, but then he lost three in a row and discovered what all Ohio State coaches absolutely have to understand before they accept the role.
Beat Michigan or else. Schmidt resigned before OSU could fire him. He moved to Idaho.
Day moved his family to Columbus during the program's two-decade belle époque likely obscured most of the history around what he hastily googled ahead of the 2019 Gold Pants ceremony. He was in an almost catatonic haze as the game ended on Saturday, wandering around the field Michigan's players had just claimed as their own, again.
in a catatonic haze after losing to Michigan for the third time in four years, WES FESLER resigned in the midst of a nervous breakdown.
Day had kept every bit of the infrastructure he inherited from Meyer and Jim Tressel. In some cases, this was to the program's detriment - everything requires modernization and proper upkeep - but there's no facet of football program management in his control that isn't immediately fixable, especially if it threatens juggernaut readiness, i.e. Ohio State's standard.
This is the foundation for why his football program may lose to Michigan or suffer a conference title drought - but it does not go into recessions. Short of a magic wand, Day can get whatever he needs in order for Ohio State to be resourced for winning everything, let alone the regular season finale. The head coach then needs to finish the job.
So his problem will never be a lack of resources. It's a lack of fit for who he is. Outside of Tressel, Day might be the most human coach since Wes Fesler, who - in a catatonic haze himself after losing to Michigan for the third time in four years - resigned in the midst of a nervous breakdown.
He was more like Day than arguably any coach in Ohio State's history - with a glaring exception.
Fesler took the job knowing absolutely everything about what being the head coach of the Buckeyes entailed. Four years later, he concluded the pressure to win in Columbus was no longer worth his health.
In that final season with the Buckeyes, Fesler coached Vic Janowicz to the Heisman Trophy. The team finished second in the Big Ten, coming off of having won the conference outright and winning the Rose Bowl. Wes wasn't exactly struggling on the field.
That glaring exception with Day was Fesler had been a three-sport alumnus of Ohio State, playing varsity football, basketball and baseball - he represented the university in a uniform every single quarter of his time in undergrad. So he knew precisely what he was signing up for when he took the reins of the program he played for in college.
But then after living it, he couldn't take it anymore and left for Minnesota to take over for Bernie Bierman, who had won two national championships for the Gophers over the previous decade.
A lateral move, if you're being generous to Ohio State. Less stress. Better work/life balance.
Day's recruiting, at least at the macro level, is consistently top-five nationally. Talent isn't the problem beyond a couple of underperforming units. Special Teams are criminally deficient, but again - this is a gap which a single spring visit to a peer program running them competently could quickly repair. It still hasn't happened, seemingly because Day insists on fixing things his own way.
Offensive line recruiting and development have been woeful for a program which has stocked the pros with trench players since the league's incorporation, but barring two freak injuries this year's unit would have been among the nation's best. The Ohio State football program generally finds a way to do more than just survive, even at the unit level.
Institutional, municipal and state support aren't deficient. The program Day was handed owns every possible advantage, simultaneously exploiting tradition impossible to counterfeit with the opulent trappings of a modern program - on top of an unimpeachable NFL track record.
Ohio State has no holes. This is not a hunting expedition, it's farming. A monster to maintain.
The problem throughout Ohio State's 134-year history of playing organized football has been that it is a hostile workplace environment which requires a very particular and almost sociopathic head coach for the arrangement to be both sustainable and mutually beneficial. Day can only be that coach if he pretends he's somebody else.
On Saturday against the Wolverines, the moment began to slowly consume him in the 1st half. By the time the game ended, Michigan had been made far better than it had any right to be. A saboteur wouldn't have been as effective as Ohio State's strategy was. The home team played itself right into the visitors' lap.
And then the Cooper comparisons took hold immediately. They're unfair, of course. Day inherited Meyer's program while Coop inherited Earle Bruce's. One was a reload, the other a rebuild, as Bruce had declined to pay maintenance on the program he was leading.
The closest thing Ohio State has ever faced that could be called a recession was when it had a coach whose nickname was 'ol nine and three. That was Bruce. College Football Hall of Famer. Nine wins was a disaster, because it is a disaster.
Ohio State barely evolved following Woody Hayes' termination, in philosophy, infrastructure or investment. This isn't Earle slander; college football's velocity was quite a bit slower during the 1980s and besides - Woody's way had worked for 28 years.
Even when the Buckeyes stumbled it still felt and looked like Ohio State football. The decline was slow, not swift. This left Coop in shock at what he discovered upon his arrival three time zones from Tempe, admitting to local media he mistakenly believed Ohio State would be significantly more equipped and resourced than Arizona State or Tulsa had been.
The primary resource, as it turned out, was the state of Ohio and its inexhaustible monopolistic energy for Buckeye football. Like Day 30 years later, Coop didn't have to beg, borrow or steal to get whatever he needed. Earle had largely kept things the way he found them. That's willful stagnation, but it ended with Coop in 1988.
Blurting what he did about the condition of OSU facilities when he got to town, along with too many slow white guys on Bruce's final roster wasn't folksy like a Texas colloquialism from Schmidt, but Coop showed vulnerability from the jump. And he did something about it.
The Buckeyes haven't punched up since Coop decided that what he inherited could never be Ohio State's standard in college football. He accelerated the program's rejuvenation in a way that only a true outsider and interloper could.
His problem was the final opponent on the regular season schedule. Despite how it appears, that isn't football. If it was, Coop would be remembered differently. Michigan is its own religion, and how it's managed determines if Ohio State's coach is remembered as righteous or sacrilegious.
Coop authored his epitaph in the Novembers between 1991 and 1996, save for 1994 - which is an exception worth discussing in a moment. But prior to '91 and following the self-sabotage of '96 - a carbon copy of this game was played over the weekend on the same field - Coop's teams and Coop himself showed up against Michigan ready to win.
They just didn't. He survived what would have been premature termination in 1992 following a tie and then finally triumphed in 1994. His 1995 and 1996 teams were nationally relevant from wire-to-wire before meeting up with underperforming - not bad - Michigan teams who disrupted the fairy tale.
That mid-tenure futility stretch was marked by images of Ohio State's head coach nervously devouring his fingernails amid the noise and unrelenting pressure to win that one game, and his teams shriveled accordingly. Michigan at that time was loaded with talented Ohioans Coop would have preferred to have in Columbus.
What would happen on those Saturdays was Coop would try his hardest to convey how normal, prepared and equipped he and his team would be for the game they could not seem to ever win. Once the slightest bit of adversity began to gnaw at their best-laid intentions, Ohio's body politic would begin to deteriorate.
The disintegration would start with the head coach's cuticles, spreading to the players' spirits and ultimately the stadium's buoyancy (or the passionate red blotches during odd-numbered seasons) before inevitability set in. Game autopsies showed an array of deficiencies, bad bets and worse bounces - but the most consistent postmortem feature of those Cooper losses was the abundance of fear.
RYAN DAY APPEARS TO BE STUCK IN A STUBBORN TRAP OF TRYING TO PROVE a meaningless point about toughness to the current head coach of the Los Angeles Chargers.
This sideline emotion wasn't present during Coop's early seasons, but once the Michigan losses began to stack up, fear metastasized through the program whenever a winged helmet appeared. Players knew what losing meant to the coach who had brought them to town.
The exception occurred during the 1994 game, when the Buckeyes' defense and special teams made the types of plays which generally fail to show up for the loser in this rivalry. Marlon Kerner blocked a field goal. Luke Fickell deflected a pass to himself and picked it off.
It's ironic, but in 1994 - Coop's breakthrough against Michigan - Ohio State lost the rushing battle, because as steady of a statistic as that might be retrospectively across eras and on radio shows, it's orphaned from vital context. The team which rushes the most yards doesn't win nearly as often as the team with the most points. Look that up if you don't believe me.
Over the weekend Day tricked himself into trying to beat Michigan by pitting his weakest unit against their strongest one instead of making Ohio State's wide receivers the main event. Try and guess what might have opened up had he leaned on Zone Six appropriately. Want to win the rushing battle? Scare the shit out of them with your receivers first.
Thirty years earlier, the Buckeyes sacked Todd Collins four times in Cooper's first triumph, which impaired Michigan's rushing total but not enough to squander a meaningless statistical victory in a game they lost badly. Michigan went 2-12 on 3rd down and shanked all of its punts that afternoon.
The Wolverines lost to Ohio State on the margins, the area of the game Day's teams three decades later consistently forfeit far more often than they seize it. If there's one area where he has differentiated himself from every other coach in history, it's been the categorical failure to produce even passable special teams performances. It has no peer.
Unfortunately, victory came to Coop in 1994 - not the other way around; had he seized the win it might have become sustainable or even habit-forming. Nerves didn't implode the effort that year, but he wasn't nearly finished stacking devastating losses against Michigan.
Thirty years after Coop finally broke through and gave the state of Ohio a false sense of security, Day was poised to do the same in resounding, antithetical fashion. Unlike recent meetings, Michigan did not have 45 seniors and grad students, any play-calling packages decoded prior to kickoff - or the benefit of curious officiating to credit or blame.
The visitors had something far more powerful. It had Ohio State's head coach psychologically hijacked prior to kickoff, fully committed to making the greatest rivalry in sports about his own insecurity. As an offensive strategist and head coach, he should have been pencils-down with the game plan before the sun set on the work week.
Saturdays are not for strategy, they're for execution. Day couldn't even get personnel packages in correctly because he was so rattled. He chose to play on Michigan's terms instead of Ohio State's, and he was once again in his own head distracted by the most important task in his job description.
It's anyone's guess why. Conventional wisdom - and I subscribe to this too - was that he prioritized proving a meaningless point about toughness to the current head coach of the Los Angeles Chargers.
Cooper brought numerous offensive juggernauts into his final exams. In 1995 he had the Heisman and Biletnikoff winners, the best offensive tackle in the history of the sport, a steady senior QB and one of the best tight ends in program history.
That offense attempted three field goals with that offense before getting into the endzone once. Tim Biakabutuka is how that game is remembered, but Ohio State's offense had nothing to do with his 313 yards rushing. It needed no help puckering on its own.
On Saturday an offense with two NFL running backs, three NFL 1st round wide receivers and a steady game manager at quarterback settled for three field goals. Ohio State made one of them.
If that was the only thing you knew about this year's game - Ohio State attempted three field goals against a Michigan team that cannot throw the ball and can barely move it otherwise - you would immediately know how the game ended without needing any other details. And you'd be right.
Day prioritized his insecurity above the only thing that matters. It's been public knowledge for 134 years. But he only found out after he was already on the payroll with his young family entrenched in his new community.
TRIGGER WARNING: The segment contains content about suicide. Text or call 988 if you are facing mental health challenges, emotional distress, substance concerns or just need to talk to someone. You are not alone.
Last week during the buildup to The Game I wrote, emphasis added:
(Day) is still the most emotionally volatile coach since Wayne Woodrow, with apologies to Urban and his calcium channel blockers:
"(Losing to Michigan) is one of the worst things that's happened to me in my life, quite honestly,” Day said. “Other than losing my father and a few other things, like it's quite honestly, for my family, the worst thing that's happened.
So we can never have that happen again ever. And that's been the approach all season.”
It's galling to hear someone say this out loud. But it acknowledges the subtext of his job requirements.
Several readers took exception to the word galling. In hindsight, if I could rewrite that sentence over again, I'd keep it intact and drill into why it isn't a strong enough descriptor.
Positioning your father's suicide when you were nine with losing a football game in your forties as equitable emotional traumas feels like a cause for pause, right up until you connect that The Game is intertwined with three critical elements to Day's survival since the worst moment of his life - a) football, which has been his lifeline and livelihood since losing his dad b) his legacy and c) his own young children.
He brings more humanity to the job than it has historically allowed. Fesler was the perfect coach for the Buckeyes on paper and peaced out quickly, despite his success. Schmidt left with a winning record against Michigan because this destination job was going to kill him. Even Tressel's chestnut brown went gray while he was annually mashing the Wolverines.
This is the job Day accepted. He didn't know anything about the desk in his haunted office.
Day met his wife when he was six years old. They initiated a mental health foundation for children in Columbus called On Our Sleeves, an accurate descriptor for how Ohio State's head coach wears his feelings. The Days have three children who are all still young enough to be living at home.
That's a critical piece to the job which dominates every breath. They all know what dad does. Football has always been a part of their lives. They also hear about it at the bus stop in the morning, at school in the afternoon and during activities in the evening. Then they get to go home and live with him.
By contrast, Coop's kids John Jr. and Cindy were already old enough to earn W-2s from the football program and the local media respectively during his tenure in Columbus. Tressel's children lived with his ex-wife. Urban's were either in or through college when he came back to Ohio.
Ohio State coaches' children go to school in Columbus with Ohio State fans' children. I grew up with coaches' kids, as well as governors' kids and grandkids. Take a wild guess as to what everyone wanted to talk about with them.
It's possible Day accepted the Ohio State job without even studying the underlying religion it's based upon, mistakenly leading him to believe he had accepted a lucrative position as a football coach in the Midwest. This is not seasonal work, nor is it a conventional spot for an ascending careerist in the trade.
Had he dug a little further into Schmidt when he kicked off that 2019 Pants ceremony he would have gotten a valuable glimpse into what would be irrevocably attached to his new workplace. Schmidt's famous for his opening press conference and the jewelry which followed.
No one really talks about his exit. But we all know why and how Ohio State coaches leave.
Day's path to staying in Columbus is quite simple: He needs to forget who he is and remember who he was.
This job is different, and Day now knows a lot more than he did back in the Woody in 2019. Coaches flame out, buckle under pressure or turn into statues in front of the practice facility named for them - but the players stay the same age and youth is to be forgiven for only understanding surface-level history as well as Day did back in his honeymoon season.
It's very hard to survive in Columbus if you wear the inescapable anxiety from the job on your sleeve. Imagine being an Ohio State player, and your head coach openly and quite bravely suffers from trauma. Think about what kind of impact that might have on you during pressure moments.
I don't know what Jayden Fielding's process is for lining up field goals, but he's who Day picked to fill Noah Ruggles' haunted cleats. The pressure to split the uprights is intense enough. The weight of millions of eyeballs, along with the two from the guy who is betting on you.
Imagine if the thought crosses your mind while you're waiting for the snap that if you're wide right and miss, you might just be responsible for sending your traumatized head coach into a very dark place. What a heavy and unnecessary burden that would be. It's no way to create a loose, confident and ferocious team on the Saturday which matters more than the others.
Day has entered and is now a resident of the same trap Cooper fell into in earnest in 1991, once the patience to rebuild had completely worn off - and after Bo Schembechler's retirement didn't cause the Wolverines to skip a beat on the season's final Saturday.
Everyone knew what Michigan meant to Coop. Everyone knows now what it means to Day - as Ohio State's head coach, you want to take part of the Michigan conversation but you have to absolutely reject becoming the conversation.
This hasn't changed in a century. It's more predictable than Michigan's inability to move the ball last Saturday - which means process and strategy have to rise above and own the moment. Anxiety is contagious. It also messes with the playbook as well as the players.
Day has made the rivalry and the game itself a public display of his personal demons and vocational shortcomings instead of a sacred homage to the greatest rivalry in sports, where the season gradually rises to a crescendo and fearlessness is the head coach's prevailing emotion.
Coaches who make Michigan about their own validation flee or get fired. This is not a recent development.
By allowing his brand equity and value to be sucked into the rivalry by Michigan's former head coach, Day created a trap for himself and lost sight of how the game is managed. He abandoned process for emotion and this weekend created a tale of ordinary average nobodies who beat Goliath’s ass in his own living room.
Saturday's loss that will reverberate in Schembechler Hall for decades. One of the weakest and most predictable Michigan teams in history came to town and Ohio State’s game plan was tailored to keep the Wolverines competitive. They were down, but they were still better than Ohio State's best.
Day allowed what should have been a track meet to become a hammer fight, where the visitors' only strength was hammer fighting. Our sample size is now significant, and there should never be another double-digit point spread in OSU’s favor as long as Day is involved. This was too damning to be excused. It's who he is.
The worst crime in this rivalry isn't losing a game. It's showcasing a palpable fear of losing and self-involvement with a tradition that cannot or ever be about one person. It's self-sabotage which he has now made his annual game strategy. He keeps doing this - Day tried to make the 2022 game a reckoning for what happened in 2021.
He pulled his elite receivers off the field in 2023 so his pitiful special teams units could kick 30-yard punts and miss 50-yard field goals. On Saturday he did Michigan's dirty work for them again by ignoring his mismatches for the majority of the afternoon.
It would be mystifying if people who grew up with this and are fluent in the rivalry failed to understand or appreciate how this game can impair head coaches. Evil Ryan Day (2018, 2019, 2020) and Catatonic Ryan Day are the same guy. They're just different people with a bunch of bad afternoons against Michigan in between.
The job did this to him, because that's what it does to everyone who isn't fully prepared to accept what they're getting into. This was true prior to the Great Depression and it will be true at the Rapture - Day's health is entangled with an event that's 51 distant weeks away, a full year of darkness.
Until then, it's last Saturday every Saturday. There are only two ways out.
One is beating the team Ohio State plays in the last game of the regular season. Not its predecessors, and definitely not its former head coach. The team on the field. His other way out is leaving, either voluntarily or by termination.
Day's path to staying in Columbus is quite simple, if he truly wants to remain Ohio State's head coach and keep his family in town. He needs to forget who he is and remember who he was. Because that's the guy who earned the right to the job.
