COLUMBUS, Ohio — How different this postgame scene must have felt for Ryan Day, the embattled head coach of Ohio State, who stood in almost the exact same place three weeks ago, on Nov. 30, as everything about his team and his tenure seemed to crumble following a fourth consecutive loss to Michigan. Screaming players, their eyes reddened from pepper spray discharged by local police officers, careened past Day in search of medical attention. Belligerent fans, their patience eroded by Day’s confounding game plan, hurled profane insults in his direction. Wounded seniors, their careers forever blemished by an inability to beat The Team Up North, brawled on the midfield logo when the Wolverines attempted to plant their flag. Chaos reigned as Day grew roots at the 24-yard line, his disbelief and disenchantment melding into temporary paralysis.
So much had changed when Day returned to that location late on Saturday evening, in the aftermath of a College Football Playoff game against Tennessee, whose fans had stormed into Ohio Stadium with fervor and left long before the fourth quarter expired. Emboldened, perhaps, by the nauseating possibility of a $20 million roster disbanding with nothing but cash to show for it, Day and his coaching staff authored and architected their finest performance of the season: a 42-17 dismantling of the Volunteers that simultaneously extended Ohio State’s season while vaulting the program back into the national championship conversation. So comprehensive was Saturday night’s victory over a respected SEC opponent that the Buckeyes opened as betting favorites against No. 1 Oregon in the quarterfinals, a Rose Bowl redux of the instant classic those teams put forth at Autzen Stadium in mid-October. On that night, the Ducks prevailed by a single point.
To earn that rematch and the chance to advance to the national semifinals, there was so much Ohio State needed to fix ahead of the postseason, so many issues both schematic and psychiatric for the coaches to explore. They needed to shore up the interior of the offensive line, where injuries had forced the Buckeyes to begin shuffling personnel. They needed to rediscover their aggressiveness in the passing game, where targets for wide receivers Jeremiah Smith and Emeka Egbuka had waned along with the volume of downfield shots. They needed to invigorate the pass rush, where veteran edge rushers Jack Sawyer and JT Tuimoloau had underachieved relative to their sky-high recruiting pedigrees. And Day himself needed to reignite Ohio Stadium, where scores of fans reveled in the possibility of his dismissal after yet another loss to Michigan.
“It had been a long lead-up for us,” Day said in his postgame news conference. “To say it doesn’t weigh on you — it does. We have a lot of pride in 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 on Saturday night — or just how many Ohio State fans would fill the stadium — Day positioned himself near the goal line during early warmups. He was a point-blank bystander for the lofted passes heaved by quarterback Will Howard toward each member of the Buckeyes’ impossibly talented receiving corps. Rep after rep, parabola after parabola, Day watched intently as Howard dropped passes into the metaphorical bucket. To close followers of the program, especially those eager to see Day removed from his highly paid post, the irony of the situation was rich: There stood Day, purveyor of a confounding, aerially averse game plan that hamstrung his team against Michigan late last month, staring at the very style of offense fans have yearned for him and offensive coordinator Chip Kelly to embrace all season.
Perhaps the reason Day was so fixated on Howard’s long passes was that he knew about the highly aggressive game plan to come. About the 37-yard touchdown pass to Smith on the team’s opening possession and the 40-yard connection to Egbuka on the second. About the wheel route to tailback TreVeyon Henderson for 21 yards and Howard’s second touchdown pass to Smith for 22 yards, this time punishing the hubris of Tennessee defensive coordinator Tim Banks for refusing to give star corner Jermod McCoy any form of safety help. By the time Howard was done dicing the Volunteers for 311 yards on 24-of-29 passing, his success enabled by a far more resolute offensive line, the Buckeyes’ lead had swelled to 32 points early in the fourth quarter.
“To win it all, you’ve got to win the first one,” Kelly said. “That’s really the whole team’s focus. I thought Ryan did a great job keeping everybody focused. There really wasn’t [any] talk about what are we going to do on Jan. 20 [when the national championship game will be played] because Jan. 20 didn’t mean anything if we didn’t take care of Dec. 21. I think our guys were laser focused on playing this game.”
But so was Tennessee’s fan base. With Knoxville only separated from Ohio Stadium by 360 miles, legions of Volunteer fans pounced on the opportunity for what many of them described as a bucket list trip, caravanning north along I-75 until they’d passed through Kentucky to invade The Buckeye State. Those who didn’t feel like driving opted to fly, stuffing the lobby of a hotel adjacent to John Glenn Columbus International Airport with men wearing checkered overalls and women debating how many layers they’d need to keep warm on a frigid Midwest night. “All of them,” one of the ladies quipped around 3:15 p.m. “You’re going to be outside 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 Ohio State’s campus long before kickoff on a 25-degree night. Pregame interviews with southern twang-toting Volunteer fans on ESPN radio revealed that most of them had paid between $200 and $300 for tickets, a range they compared to away prices for conference games against Vanderbilt. A leaked presale 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 on Saturday night, somewhere between 25% and 35% of them wore orange.
“I think they thought [that] they were going to take over this place,” Howard said.
That Tennessee had enough fans to theoretically do so underscores just how precarious the early moments of Saturday’s game really were, how much potential there was for the mood inside Ohio Stadium to sour and seethe toward outright castigation had the Buckeyes fallen behind early. Instead, the Scarlet and Gray faithful who surfaced were treated to a resounding victory in which Ohio State led by 21 at the end of the first quarter and outgained the Volunteers by 217 total yards — all while harassing quarterback Nico Iamaleava to the tune of four sacks, nine pass breakups and a 45.2% completion rate, by far his lowest of the season.
Drips and drabs of Tennessee fans seeped through the exits with more than 13 minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, their flickering hopes for a comeback dashed by an Iamaleava incompletion on fourth down. So secure was Ohio State’s victory that an assistant coach who watches these games from the booth snuck away for a bathroom break as snaps were still unfolding, joining a few reporters in the restroom while chatter still popped through his headset.
“I told them in the locker room that in life you’re going to be defined by the way you handle adversity in life,” Day said, “as a person, as a man, as a dad. So to see the way that they responded in this game [after losing to Michigan], you could tell from the jump that they had a look in their eye that they were going to go 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 he hugged his kids just a few yards from where the madness had unfolded all around him on Nov. 30. And on this night, he’d earned the right to smile.
Michael Cohen covers college football and basketball for FOX Sports with an emphasis on the Big Ten. Follow him at @Michael_Cohen13.
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