Despite all the criticism his tenure at Ohio State has drawn, Ryan Day leaves Monday’s 34-23 National Championship Game victory over Notre Dame as a part of an exclusive club with Paul Brown, Woody Hayes, Jim Tressel and Urban Meyer as the Buckeyes’ only team-winning head coaches titles.
Not bad company considering Brown is a Pro Football Hall of Famer. Tressel and Hayes are being inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, and Meyer will certainly join them in some unspecified time in the future.
Day is now a part of a fraternity of national championship coaches, together with a person named Lou Holtz.
Tonight’s championship, coming at the expense of a Notre Dame program that last won under Holtz in 1988, seems particularly appropriate. Day’s most memorable moments with the Buckeyes before Monday were in September 2023, when he followed Ohio State’s 17-14 victory Day called Holtz in a post-match interview.
Holtz made the comments in the lead-up to Ohio State’s visit to Notre Dame Stadium, dismissing the Buckeyes’ ability to cope with the physicality of teams with comparable talent levels. Day, stung by the criticism, responded when Ohio State won with a goal-line touchdown – an comprehensible response.
But Holtz’s criticism was not without merit at the time – nor would it not be any less relevant just two months after Ohio State’s 13-10 loss to Michigan to end the regular season.
Similarly, the opening play of the national championship game resembled a well-known scenario unfolding. Notre Dame’s opening possession consumed nearly the first 10 minutes of the game, during which two successful fourth-down conversions resulted in Riley Leonard’s touchdowns at the goal line.
Eighteen pieces. Seventy-five yards. Notre Dame’s offensive line is on the heels of Ohio State’s defense in a way no opponent has done before on this playoff run. That first drive might need confirmed every criticism of Day’s Ohio State teams as backing down when things get physical – if it weren’t for the Buckeyes returning fire and several others.
The Fighting Irish could have prevented the championship from turning right into a laughing matter after Ohio State jumped out to a 28-7 lead early in the second half. Leonard provided a lift of inspiration together with his season-best pass and team-best 40-yard rushing performance.
However, after the initial drive, Notre Dame was never the aggressor again. The Buckeyes’ run defense held an opponent that entered the field averaging over 210 yards per game to just 53 yards per game.
Seven tackles for loss, spread amongst six Buckeyes, contributed to a miserable rushing rating.
Ohio State’s offensive line also stepped up, opening holes for ball carriers who were able to gain 214 rushing yards – 78 greater than Notre Dame allowed per game – with 1.6 more yards per carry than the Fighting Irish previously allowed.
Ohio State’s dominance in the trenches was consistent throughout the playoffs. The Buckeyes scored 4 touchdowns against the Tennessee defense, totaling nine rushing scores in the previous 12 games.
Oregon looked completely overwhelmed on each lines during the Rose Bowl, and the physicality of the Buckeyes’ defensive seven showed in the most stressful moment of the Cotton Bowl, sealing the victory against Texas.
It was these three preceding performances that made Notre Dame’s impressive first drive so shocking, but additionally foreshadowed Ohio State’s ability to turn things around, as Day noted in his postgame news conference.
“The first drive went straight into the field,” he said. “We reacted strongly, we never flinched. And… if you think about the road we’ve taken in the playoffs, a lot of it [it is] the way we reacted at the end of the season.”
Ohio State’s championship season wasn’t perfect. In fact, the 2024 Buckeyes are currently the only national champion to have two losses since the Associated Press stopped awarding the title before bowl games in 1968.
“It’s an even better story now,” Day said of Ohio State, which used an expanded playoff to engineer the change. “I always felt in the back of my mind that the people of Ohio and the entire Buckeye Nation, after going through the hard times and seeing the team and the coaching group go through the hard times, it would mean even more to achieve your goal.”