Where does Ohio State Football go from here?

After our second straight blowout loss to our biggest rival (on our home turf), many Ohio State fans wondered where did we go from here? Going into this season, we were under the assumption that the avenging of the heartbreak of last year’s loss in Ann Arbor would be the primary motivation for this year’s team en route to a national championship. If you ask Ohio State fans what our expectations of this team were going into this season, we would have all said national championship or bust. Head Coach Ryan Day had already had a reputation of not turning up in big games (2019 Fiesta Bowl, 2021 National Championship, 2021 matchup vs Oregon, and 2021 matchup vs. Michigan) but we thought due to massive staff changes that included the dismissal of the entire defensive staff minus Larry Johnson, a new special teams coach, and a new offensive line coach, it would be different. Combined with the fact we were returning the Heisman favorite CJ Stroud, a lethal running back duo in Treyveon Henderson and Miyan Williams, the best receiving core in the talent, and one of the most talented defenses in the country, there was no reason to think we were not winning it all. We were wrong. Yesterday, you could not sense a team who wanted to avenge last year’s loss. It looked like Michigan was the team with the chip on its shoulder. We are a more talented team than Michigan and Michigan were playing without their best player. That all comes down to coaching. At Ohio State, you are defined by how you perform against Michigan. It does not matter whether you’ve rattled 11 straight wins en route to The Game, you need to finish strong. Many Ohio State fans like me saw the warning signs throughout the season (bad offensive playcalling, big passing plays given up by the defense, silly penalties) but some fans coughed it up to anticipation of The Game. Michigan capitalized on all of those weaknesses enroute to a playoff spot. Now where do we go from here? In my opinion, the last big change Ryan Day could possibly make is to hand over the play calling to literally anyone else but, that does not fix the biggest problem. The biggest problem being the discipline and hunger required to win these big games and ultimately, win the national championship. That comes down to the coach. Jim Tressel and Urban Meyer were flawed coaches on and off the field, but they would never tolerate this because they were from Ohio, and they knew what this meant to the state. Ryan Day is from New Hampshire (so he cannot emotionally resonate with this rivalry) and as Jim Harbaugh correctly said, “he was born on third base”. In other words, Day was given the keys to a Lambo (the recruiting infrastructure, talent, and football program structure flawlessly set up by Meyer) and now, he has run it into a brick wall as soon as most of Urban’s players left. It does not matter how much talent you have attained (Justin Fields, Chris Olave, Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Garrett Wilson, Jeremy Ruckert, Marvin Harrison Jr.,), if you cannot build an elite culture of discipline and hunger every big game, you will not suceed. It is unacceptable that we have had as much talent as we have had and not won at least one national championship. I do not care that Day is 45–5, I care that he is not 50–0. This is not Florida State, this is Ohio State. All of those wins and five stars are meaningless without a national title. Going into this season, Day was on the hot seat for me and now he needs to go and we need to make a hail mary run for Luke Fickell or Mike Vrabel and inject life back into a program that is bound for purgatory.