For all the criticism his tenure at Ohio State has attracted, Ryan Day leaves Monday’s 34-23 National Championship Game win over Notre Dame as part of an exclusive club with Paul Brown, Woody Hayes, Jim Tressel, and Urban Meyer as the Buckeyes’ only title-winning head coaches.
Not bad company, considering Brown is a Pro Football Hall of Famer. Tressel and Hayes are each inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, and Meyer will surely join them at some point.
And Day is now in the fraternity of national championship-winning coaches, alongside one Lou Holtz.
Day’s championship, coming at the expense of a Notre Dame program that last won the big one under Holtz in 1988, seems especially fitting. Among the more memorable moments of Day’s time with the Buckeyes prior to Monday came in September 2023, when, following Ohio State’s 17-14 win, Day called out Holtz in a postgame interview.
Holtz made comments in the lead-up to Ohio State’s visit to Notre Dame Stadium, dismissing the Buckeyes’ ability to handle physicality from teams of comparable talent levels. Day, taking umbrage with the criticism, fired back when Ohio State won with a goal-line touchdown—a response that was understandable.
But Holtz’s critique wasn’t without merit at the time—nor would it have been any less valid just two months after Ohio State’s 13-10 loss to Michigan to close the regular season.
Likewise, the opening drive of the National Championship Game felt like a familiar script playing out. Notre Dame’s initial possession ate up nearly the first 10 minutes of the game, featuring two successful fourth-down conversions and culminating in Riley Leonard punching in a goal-line touchdown.
Eighteen plays. Seventy-five yards. Notre Dame’s offensive line pushing the Ohio State defense back on its heels in a way no opponent had in this Playoff before. That first drive could have validated every critique of Day’s Ohio State teams as backing down from the fight when things get physical—if not for the Buckeyes returning fire and then some.
The Fighting Irish may have prevented the championship contest from turning into a laugher after Ohio State went ahead 28-7 early in the second half. Leonard gave an inspired effort with his best passing performance of the season and a team-high 40 rushing yards.
After the initial drive, however, Notre Dame was never again the aggressor. The Buckeyes’ run defense held an opponent that came in averaging more than 210 yards per game on the ground to just 53 yards.
Seven tackles for loss, spread among six Buckeyes, contributed to the paltry rushing yield.
The Ohio State offensive line also asserted itself, opening holes for ball-carriers to rack up 214 rushing yards—78 more than Notre Dame had been allowing per game—at 1.6 yards more per carry than the Fighting Irish had previously allowed.
Ohio State’s dominance in the trenches was a constant throughout its Playoff run. The Buckeyes ran for four touchdowns against a Tennessee defense that allowed nine rushing scores in its previous 12 games combined.
Oregon looked completely overwhelmed on both lines in the Rose Bowl Game, and the physicality of the Buckeyes’ defensive front seven showed up in the most high-pressure spot of the Cotton Bowl, sealing the win against Texas.
Those three preceding performances are what made Notre Dame’s imposing first drive so jarring—but also foreshadowed Ohio State’s ability to turn it around, which Day noted in his postgame press conference.
“That first drive went right down the field,” he said. “We responded in a big way, never flinched. And… if you think about the run we’ve gone on here in the playoffs, a big part of [it is] the way we’ve responded coming off the end of the season.”
Ohio State’s championship season wasn’t perfect. In fact, the 2024 Buckeyes now stand as the sole two-loss national champion since the Associated Press stopped awarding its title before the bowl games in 1968.
“Now it’s an even better story,” Day said of Ohio State capitalizing on the expanded Playoff to engineer this turnaround. “Always in the back of my mind, I felt that the people of Ohio and all of Buckeye Nation, after going through difficult times and seeing a team and a bunch of coaches go through difficult times, achieving their goal would mean even more.”
