Ohio State and Ryan Day silence critics with resounding victory over Tennessee

COLUMBUS, Ohio – How different this postgame scene must have been for Ryan Day, Ohio State’s embattled head coach, who found himself in almost exactly the same place three weeks ago, on Nov. 30, while everything about his team and his tenure seemed to fall apart after a fourth consecutive loss to Michigan. Screaming players, their eyes red from the pepper spray fired by local police officers, walked past Day seeking medical attention. Belligerent fans, their patience eroded by Day’s confusing game plan, hurled profane insults in his direction. The wounded veterans, their careers forever stained by their inability to beat Team Up North, brawled at the midfield logo as the Wolverines attempted to plant their flag. Chaos reigned as Day took root at the 24-yard line, his disbelief and disenchantment melting into temporary paralysis.

Much had changed when Day returned to that spot Saturday night after a College Football Playoff game against Tennessee, whose fans stormed Ohio Stadium with fervor and left long before the fourth quarter expired. Emboldened, perhaps, by the nauseating prospect of a $20 million roster disbanding with nothing but cash, Day and his coaching staff created and engineered their best performance of the season: a 42-all dismantling of the Volunteers. -17 which at the same time extended to Ohio. state season while also returning the program to the national championship conversation. Saturday night’s victory over a respected SEC opponent was so complete that the Buckeyes opened as betting favorites against No. 1 Oregon in the quarterfinals, a Rose Bowl version of the instant classic those teams featured at Autzen Stadium in mid-October. That night, the Ducks prevailed by a single point.

To earn that rematch and a chance to advance to the national semifinals, Ohio State needed to fix so much before the postseason, so many issues both schematic and psychiatric for coaches to explore. They needed to shore up the interior of the offensive line, where injuries had forced the Buckeyes to begin changing personnel. They needed to rediscover their aggressiveness in the passing game, where the targets of wide receivers Jeremiah Smith and Emeka Egbuka had decreased along with the volume of downfield throws. They needed to revitalize the pass rush, where veteran pass rushers Jack Sawyer and JT Tuimoloau had underperformed their sky-high recruiting pedigrees. And Day himself needed to revive Ohio Stadium, where dozens of fans were reveling in the possibility of his firing after another loss to Michigan.

“It’s been a long lead-up for us,” Day said in his postgame press conference. “Saying it doesn’t weigh on you, yes. We are very proud of who we are. These guys have a lot of pride.

“I think it says a lot about who our guys are that we were able to respond like that in a big way.”

Long before anyone knew which version of Ohio State would show up Saturday night, or how many Ohio State fans would fill the stadium, Day positioned himself near the goal line during early warmups. He was a point-blank spectator of the lofted passes thrown by quarterback Will Howard to each member of the Buckeyes’ incredibly talented receiving corps. Rep. after rep., parable after parable, Day watched intently as Howard threw passes into the metaphorical bucket. For close followers of the program, especially those eager to see Day removed from his highly-paid position, the irony of the situation was rich: Here was Day, purveyor of a confusing, aerially adversarial game plan that crippled his team against Michigan. at the end of last month. , looking at the style of offense that fans have longed for him and offensive coordinator Chip Kelly to adopt all season.

Perhaps the reason Day was so obsessed with Howard’s long passes was that he knew the highly aggressive game plan ahead. About the 37-yard touchdown pass to Smith on the team’s first possession and the 40-yard connection to Egbuka on the second. On the wheel route to running back TreVeyon Henderson for 21 yards and Howard’s second touchdown pass to Smith for 22 yards, this time punishing the arrogance of Tennessee defensive coordinator Tim Banks for refusing to hit star cornerback Jermod McCoy any form of security assistance. By the time Howard finished outscoring the Volunteers for 311 yards on 24-of-29 passing, their success made possible by a much more determined offensive line, the Buckeyes’ lead had grown to 32 points early in the fourth quarter.

“To win it all, you have to win the first one,” Kelly said. “That’s really the whole team’s focus. I thought Ryan did a great job keeping everyone focused. There really was no [any] talk about what we are going to do on January 20 [when the national championship game will be played] because January 20th meant nothing if we didn’t deal with December 21st. “I think our guys were very focused on playing this game.”

But so was the Tennessee fan base. With Knoxville only separated from Ohio Stadium by 360 miles, legions of volunteer fans took the opportunity for what many of them described as a bucket-list trip, caravanning north on I-75 past Kentucky to invade the Buckeye State. Those who didn’t feel like driving opted to fly, filling the lobby of a hotel adjacent to John Glenn Columbus International Airport with men in plaid overalls and women debating how many layers they would need to stay warm on a frigid Midwestern night. “All of them,” one of the women joked around 3:15 p.m. “You’ll be out for like the next eight hours.”

Thousands more Tennessee fans had already been braving the elements for quite some time, infiltrating the side streets and watering holes adjacent to the Ohio State campus well before kickoff on a 25-degree night. Pregame interviews with Southern Volunteer fans on ESPN radio revealed that most of them had paid between $200 and $300 for tickets, a range they compared to road prices for conference games against Vanderbilt. A leaked pre-sale had allowed untold numbers of visiting fans to purchase tickets in the days after this year’s playoff bracket was revealed. Of the 102,819 fans in attendance Saturday night, between 25% and 35% wore orange.

“I think they thought [that] They were going to take over this place,” Howard said.

The fact that Tennessee had enough fans to theoretically do so underscores how precarious the opening moments of Saturday’s game really were, how much potential there was for the atmosphere inside Ohio Stadium to sour and boil toward outright punishment if the Buckeyes had fallen behind. early. Instead, the emerging Scarlet and Gray faithful enjoyed a resounding victory in which Ohio State led by 21 at the end of the first quarter and outscored the Volunteers by 217 total yards, all while harassing quarterback Nico Iamaleava with four sacks . , nine deflected passes and a completion rate of 45.2%, by far the lowest of the season.

Drops and drops of Tennessee fans filtered through the exits with more than 13 minutes left in the fourth quarter, their faltering hopes of a comeback dashed by Iamaleava’s incomplete pass on fourth down. Ohio State’s victory was so certain that an assistant coach who watches these games from the booth snuck out to the bathroom while the snaps were still unfolding, joining some reporters in the bathroom while the chatter still played through his headphones.

“I told them in the locker room that in life you will define yourself by the way you handle adversity in life,” Day said, “as a person, as a man, as a father. So to see the way they responded in this game [after losing to Michigan]You could tell from the jump that they had a look in their eyes that they were going to win this game. “I thought they played that way.”

The look in Day’s eyes was equally telling as the band played “Carmen Ohio” to celebrate a monumental victory and the extension of Ohio State’s season. He hugged his wife and hugged his children just feet from where the madness had unfolded around him on November 30. And that night, he had earned the right to smile.

Michael Cohen covers college football and basketball for FOX Sports with an emphasis on the Big Ten. follow him on @Michael_Cohen13.

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