michael cohen
College Football and College Basketball Writer
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Standing in almost the exact same spot three weeks ago on Nov. 30, Ohio State coach Ryan Day must have felt how different the postgame scene would have been. They collapsed after losing four straight games to Michigan. The players, whose eyes were red and screaming due to the pepper spray sprayed by the local police, struggled to receive treatment from Daya. Belligerent fans, growing impatient with Day’s confusing game plan, hurled insults at him. The injured seniors, whose careers were forever ruined by their inability to beat The Team Up North, fought over the midfield logo as the Wolverines attempted to plant the flag. As Day took root at the 24-yard line, chaos reigned, his disbelief and disillusionment mixing into temporary paralysis.
A lot had changed when Day returned to that location late Saturday evening after the College Football Playoff game against Tennessee. Tennessee fans flocked to Ohio Stadium with enthusiasm and left long before the end of the fourth quarter. Perhaps emboldened by the sickening possibility that a $20 million squad could be disbanded for cash alone, Day and his coaching staff drafted and engineered their best performance of the season. The state’s season puts the program back into the national championship conversation. Saturday night’s win over a respected SEC opponent was so comprehensive that the Buckeyes opened as betting favorites against No. 1 Oregon in the quarterfinals. It was a Rose Bowl redux of the instant classic the teams put up at Autzen Stadium in mid-October. That night, the Ducks won by one point.
To earn a rematch and a chance to advance to the national semifinals, Ohio State had too many issues to fix ahead of the postseason, and too many schematic and mental issues for coaches to explore. They needed to bolster the interior of their offensive line, where the Buckeyes were starting to shuffle personnel due to injuries. They had to rediscover their aggressiveness in the passing game. The targets of wide receivers Jeremiah Smith and Emeka Egbuka have weakened along with the amount of downfield shots. They needed to revitalize their pass rush, where veteran edge rushers Jack Sawyer and JT Tuimoloau were underperforming despite their high recruiting pedigree. And Day himself needed some rekindling at Ohio Stadium, where throngs of fans cheered the possibility of him being fired after another loss to Michigan.
“It’s been a long preparation for us,” Day said in his postgame press conference. “If you say it doesn’t weigh on you, it does. We take a lot of pride in who we are. These guys take a lot of pride.
“I think the fact that we were able to respond in such a big way says a lot about who our guys are.”
Long before we knew what version of Ohio State would appear on Saturday night, or how many Ohio State fans would fill the stadium, Day took his position near the goal line during early warmups. He was a bystander watching directly as quarterback Will Howard hoisted lofted passes toward each member of the Buckeyes’ incredibly talented receiving corps. Repeat, repeat, parabolic repeat, Day watched intently as Howard dropped a pass into the metaphorical bucket. For followers of the program, especially those eager to see Day removed from his high-paying position, the irony of the situation was abundant. There stood Day, who provided a chaotic, anti-air game plan that hampered his team in a win over Michigan late last month. , the same offensive style fans admired him and offensive coordinator Chip Kelly for and embraced this season.
Perhaps the reason Day was so fixated on Howard’s long passes was because he knew the very aggressive game plan that was coming. A 37-yard touchdown pass to Smith on the team’s opening possession and a 40-yard connection to Egbuka on the second. On Howard’s second touchdown pass, this time on a wheel route to tailback TreVeyon Henderson for 21 yards and to Smith for 22 yards, this time from Tennessee defensive coordinator Tim Banks, who refused to provide any form of safety assistance to star corner Jermod McCoy. Arrogance was punished. When Howard finished dicing the Volunteers for 311 yards on 24-of-29 passing, his success made possible by a much more determined offensive line, the Buckeyes’ lead swelled to 32 points early in the fourth quarter.
“To win everything, you have to win the first one,” Kelly said. “That’s the focus of the whole team. I think Ryan did a great job of keeping everyone focused. There was absolutely no talk about what we were going to do on Jan. 20 (the day of the national championship game). “Because if we didn’t take care of it on December 21st, January 20th didn’t mean anything, I think our guys were focused on playing this game.”
But so did Tennessee’s fan base. Knoxville was only 360 miles from Ohio Stadium, so many Volunteers fans jumped at the opportunity for what they described as a bucket list trip, caravanning north along I-75 through Kentucky and invading the Buckeye State. People who didn’t want to drive chose to fly, filling the lobby of a hotel adjacent to John Glenn Columbus International Airport, where men in plaid overalls and women debated how many layers they should wear to keep warm on a cold Midwestern night. “Everyone,” one woman quipped around 3:15 p.m. “You’ll be out for the next eight hours.”
Thousands of Tennessee fans had already been braving the inclement weather for quite some time, infiltrating the alleys and bars next to Ohio State’s campus long before kickoff on a 25-degree night. A pregame interview with Southern Volunteer fans on ESPN Radio revealed that most of them paid between $200 and $300 for tickets. This is a range compared to the price of a conference game away trip to Vanderbilt. A leaked pre-sale allowed scores of visiting fans to purchase tickets just days after this year’s playoff bracket was revealed. Of the 102,819 fans in attendance Saturday night, between 25 and 35 percent wore orange.
“I think they thought they were going to take this place,” Howard said.
That Tennessee theoretically had enough fans to do so highlights just how precarious the early moments of Saturday’s game actually were, and how likely it was that the atmosphere inside Ohio Stadium would turn sour and boil toward outright discipline if the Buckeyes fell behind early. do. Instead, the Scarlet and Gray faithful came to the surface and pulled off a huge victory, with Ohio State outscoring the Volunteers by 21 at the end of the first quarter and outscoring the Volunteers with 217 total yards, while also harassing quarterback Nico Iamaleava to the tune of four sacks. , had nine pass breakups and a 45.2% completion percentage, his lowest of the season.
With more than 13 minutes left in the fourth quarter, the sound of Tennessee fans dripping through the exits, their flickering hopes of a comeback dashed by Iamaleava’s failure in the fourth quarter. Ohio State’s win was so certain that the assistant coach who was watching the game from the booth sneaked out to go to the bathroom while the snaps were still unfolding and joined several reporters in the bathroom while chatter was still blasting through his headset. Joined.
“I told them in the locker room that in life you will be defined by how you handle life’s adversities,” Day said. “As a person, as a man, as a dad. So to see the way they did it, you could tell from the jump that they were going to win this game (after losing to Michigan). I thought they played like that.”
The look in Day’s eyes said the same thing as the band played “Carmen Ohio” to celebrate the monumental win and Ohio State’s extended season. He hugged his wife and hugged his children just yards away from where the madness unfolded around him on November 30th. And tonight, he earned the right to smile.
Michael Cohen covers college football and basketball for FOX Sports with a focus on the Big Ten. follow him @Michael_Cohen13.
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