Unless Ohio State manages to pull off a minor upset Saturday afternoon in Ann Arbor, Day is on the brink of a third straight loss and a 1-3 record against The School Up North. That prospect is untenable for Ohio State fans, even in the face of an otherwise remarkable record (dominant recruiting, NFL pipeline, two conference titles, two College Football Playoff appearances) that rightfully places a dominant mark at the national level perpetually on the cusp of a national championship. championship and will keep Day in place even if a certain element wants him eliminated.
A day’s work in Columbus is everything an Ohio State fan could ask for, minus the one thing that’s perhaps more important than the actual championships. If you disagree, find your local Buckeye, probably disenfranchised despite the team having the best player in the sport in Marvin Harrison Jr. and an 11-0 record on Saturday, and proceed as following :
1. Ask them if they think Day should leave if Ohio State gets beaten again on Saturday.
2. When they say yes, submit the blind resume of a head coach with offensive experience who has won 90 percent of his games, has an 18-6 record against ranked teams and has overseen four consecutive classes among the first five signatories producing a future first round. draft pick.
3. Tell them it’s the day. (Allow four to six feet of space.)
Simply put, it doesn’t matter if you can’t beat Michigan.
This isn’t specifically an exercise in belittling Ohio State fans, they’re just occupying this bizarre space of seriously attacking a coach that almost every other fan base would die for. The reductive psychology of college football is a feature, not a bug. If you associate these circumstances with any sporting rivalry within the ruling class, you would create similar circumstances.
What’s unique about Day’s plight is that he gets people the idea of Urban Meyer. The dirty secret of this sport is that you don’t sell success, you sell the anticipation of success. Have you ever noticed how annoyed Nick Saban is the nanosecond after Alabama wins a national title? This is because the clock immediately moved to a new set of expectations, and any acknowledgment of what just happened is a waste of perspective inapplicable to the new task at hand. Even at the highest levels… especially at the highest levels, where those with the deepest pockets roam — a college football coach deals with the emotional fairness of a better future, and Meyer had that in spades in Columbus.
Meyer is still a popular name in the histrionic cultures of message boards when a position opens up. That’s basically because he’s a head coach living on unemployment with a national title in the playoff era, period. Meyer’s prospects in a transfer portal, NIL world with his checkered track record are questionable at best, and I’d say if he returned to Columbus tomorrow the program would be worse off by 2025 compared to serving with Day.
But the Ohio native’s impeccable 7-0 record against Michigan shielded him from the strife of various postseason disappointments and gave him the benefit of all doubts when he was faced with scandal. Meyer owned Michigan every November, making each subsequent season something Buckeyes fans could anticipate. To that end, he keeps a halo around his head in Ohio. It’s not him that people miss, but this perpetual trust.
I would always say that Ohio State’s Sugar Bowl victory over Alabama postseason 2014 is the most important college football game of this generation because of its instant validation of the playoff format, and there is certainly no higher standard than the national title that Meyer brought to Columbus a few days later, but all politics is local, and 7-0 is unassailable. That’s what defines him there, and it’s most important when the current guy can’t compare.
“Except Michigan cheated!” »
I’m also not entirely sure the current mess in Michigan works in Day’s favor. At some point, the Big Blue narrative for 2023 expanded beyond the capacity of a simple summary — you remember that coach Jim Harbaugh is serving his second suspension on the field of the season, right? — to the point where the details of Day’s undefeated Ohio State team seem to go unnoticed.
Is it possible for one of the biggest brands in the sport to go unnoticed during an undefeated season heading into the biggest game of the season? And if that’s the case, wouldn’t a loss to Michigan on Saturday be a deciding factor for the Buckeyes’ entire season? After all, the opposing team’s coach wasn’t even allowed into the stadium and you still lost.
Conversely, if the Buckeyes win on Saturday, you could construct a narrative that Day only loses to “The School Up North” when he “cheats,” but that’s a gross simplification of both Michigan’s recent victories against Ohio State. Even assuming the Wolverines benefited as much as possible from pre-detection of play signals, the Michigan team 2021 And 2022 the victories were the result of total program improvement: neither the 42-27 nor 45-23 results were particularly close. Michigan was a more dominant program imposing a vastly improved product, unheard of in the Harbaugh era.
Whether you choose to maximize or minimize the tangible benefit that the scouting scandal brought to the Wolverines, neither view represents anything close to the total whipping that Michigan inflicted on the State of Ohio. A sensible outlook on Michigan’s 2023 horizon will only be possible when we can simultaneously support competing ideas: The Signal scandal went far beyond standard unofficial practice and attacks the heart of Michigan’s self-aggrandizing piety. And it didn’t really matter when the Wolverines could just beat teams to death with a blunted Blake Corum.
Day knows this, as does Ohio State, while acknowledging there is nothing wrong with his program except that its rival is just as good for the first time in the game’s modern era Both schools are legitimate national title contenders in a four-team championship format for the third straight season, and neither is showing signs of decline (minus a mythical NCAA tidal wave and/or bid to NFL job crashing into Ann Arbor, and even if that happened, interim head coach Sherrone Moore seemed more than capable).
We’re just not used to a single rivalry holding this much championship potential. That doesn’t mean Ohio State would take a legitimate step to terminate Day if it loses on Saturday. This would mark a level of madness never seen before in a sport built in the absence of logic.
But this is college football; emotion is undefeated against logic, and the first time it’s not true, it won’t be college football.
