At 12:40 a.m. ET Tuesday, after Ryan Day signed off from an on-field ESPN interview with Scott Van Pelt and finally headed toward the Mercedes-Benz Stadium locker room, it was time to ask the question. Time to ask the coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes about his profound act of celebration at the end of winning the national championship.
With the final seconds ticking down and victory secure against the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, Day set off at a half jog along the sideline. He pulled off his headset and yanked the equipment off his belt. He wound up and heaved the entire communication device—cathartically and perhaps defiantly—into the air like an Olympic hammer thrower. It flew over the Ohio State Buckeyes bench and toward the stands like he was releasing himself from shackles.
“Oh, that was nice,” Day says, with a laugh. “I wanted to smash it.”
The headset is used for communication with his fellow Ohio State coaches during a game, of course. But symbolically it’s also a refuge from the “outside noise” coaches so often talk about. And few, if any, wildly successful coaches have had to endure more outside noise than Day.
Coach third base. Can’t beat the Michigan Wolverines. Can’t win the big one. Should be fired (with a 69–10 record before Monday night). The criticism has been relentless over the course of a four-year losing streak to Michigan, and it was downright vicious when the Wolverines won in Ohio Stadium as three-touchdown underdogs Nov. 30.
There was only one way to escape it. By coming back and winning the whole damn thing.
And so the Buckeyes did, authoring a four-game stampede through the first 12-team College Football Playoff and culminating it with a 34–23 victory over stubbornly game Notre Dame. Ohio State was utterly dominant for most of this playoff run, then resilient and poised in the few moments in which it was seriously challenged.
The average margin of playoff victory was 17.5 points against teams ranked No. 1 (the Oregon Ducks), No. 3 (Texas Longhorns), No. 5 (Notre Dame) and No. 7 (Tennessee Volunteers). The Bucks made it look easy, even if it wasn’t. For the head coach, the path through persecution was arduous.
“God made it hard for a reason,” Day said. “This game can give you the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. It can take you to your knees some days as a player and as a coach. I’ve been there before.
“If you surround yourself with great people, you’re resilient, and you believe in the guys around you, and you just keep fighting and keep putting one foot in front of the other, you give yourself another chance.”
Ultimately, the traumatic fourth straight loss to Michigan became a launching pad, not a burial ground, for the Buckeyes’ season. They were booed off their home field that day; now they’ll be welcomed home as conquering heroes fewer than two months later. The team that emerged from that rubble was an absolute juggernaut, best in America by far.
Now Day can listen to the outside noise. The season is over, the title is won, and the noise has drastically changed in tenor.
“Now he’s a hero,” says Ohio State assistant athletic director for sports performance Mickey Marotti as he watched Day wave to the fans who saluted him postgame. Many of them undoubtedly were among the tens of thousands who booed Day and his team off the field Nov. 30. It was bad enough for a while that even the Buckeyes’ mantra was an overstatement.
“We say ‘Ohio Against the World,’ ” offensive coordinator Chip Kelly says. “At times, it was the ‘Woody Hayes Athletic Complex Against the World.’ It was just us.”
The extent of the discontent was on startling display in Ohio State’s first-round game against Tennessee, the first time back in The Horseshoe after the Michigan mess. A good 35,000 Volunteers fans infiltrated for that game, indicating the anger Buckeye National felt toward its own team.
But Ohio State was ready for its rebirth from the opening snap of the playoff. It blitzed Tennessee 21–0 in the first quarter, roared to a 34–0 lead on Oregon, never trailed Texas and took a 31–7 lead on the Fighting Irish on Monday night.
On the play that gave Ohio State the lead for good against Notre Dame, Quinshon Judkins took a handoff to the left end of the line of scrimmage. In a snapshot of both the game and the entire playoff, the Buckeye baptized the unfortunate opponents who dared to get in his way.
Judkins was first encountered by Notre Dame linebacker Jaiden Ausberry, a redshirt freshman. The 219-pound Judkins placed his white-gloved right hand on the front of Ausberry’s shiny gold helmet and shoved him down, planting him in the turf at the 9-yard line—a stiff arm of vicious beauty. Then Judkins proceeded into a collision with freshman cornerback Leonard Moore at the 4-yard line, whereupon he rampaged through Moore’s body and carried him to the end zone.
That made the score 14–7. An avalanche was underway. The stiff-arming of the 12-team playoff was seemingly complete. A massively talented and supremely focused team scored the first five times it possessed the ball, cleansing itself of the maize-and-blue stain on its soul.
But Notre Dame made a valiant fourth-quarter comeback, trimming a 31–7 deficit to eight points in the final minutes and necessitating one great play from the Buckeyes. Two runs by quarterback Will Howard went nowhere, leading Ohio State to face a third-and-11 and the specter of giving the ball back for a tying score.
Kelly sent Howard to the line of scrimmage with two play calls. If Notre Dame was in a zone that bracketed superstar freshman wide receiver Jeremiah “JJ” Smith, throw a shorter and safer route. But if the Irish were single-covering Smith in man-to-man, go ahead and take the deep shot.
Howard took the deep shot. Smith blew past Notre Dame corner Christian Gray—the hero of the Orange Bowl victory over Penn State with a late interception—and hauled it in for a 56-yard lightning strike. Game effectively over.
It was a gutsy call, though Kelly downplayed it. “Just throw it to your best player and let him run by them,” he quipped. “JJ is special, and Will was special all game.”
Howard was indeed incredible, completing his first 13 passes and finishing the game 17-of-21 for 231 yards with two touchdowns and no interceptions. He also ran it a team-high 16 times for 57 yards. His four-game playoff performance may appreciably change his NFL draft stock.
“I don’t know why he doesn’t get more credit,” Kelly says.
Howard was part of the strategic building of the Ohio State roster that led to this day—this title was won in no small part a year ago. In the wake of the hated Wolverines capturing the 2023 championship, the Buckeyes launched a copycat campaign to retain many of their best players for a glory run of their own.
In early January 2024, eight Buckeyes who would have been draft picks instead chose to stay in school. Combined with three star transfers—Howard and Judkins included—the roster was one of Ohio State’s most talented in history.
That added to the pressure and expectations weighing on Ohio State all season. The stunning Michigan loss looked like it might crush them, but Day didn’t see it that way.
“It wasn’t like at the end of the year we were broken,” Day said. “It wasn’t that way. We had an awful day. I don’t know how else to describe it. We had an awful day, and we just said we could never do that again.”
The advent of the 12-team playoff provided Ohio State a do-over that wouldn’t have been available in the four-team era. The Buckeyes seized the moment.
“We had to stick together because we knew we were in the playoffs,” former Ohio State coach Jim Tressel said. “That’s the beauty of it. They did a masterful job of keeping that team together. Now we’re living large.”
On the award stage after the game, Day’s family stood at the back beaming as confetti fell and cheers echoed around the stadium. On Nov. 30, Day’s two daughters were portraits of despair on the sideline, tears streaming down their frozen cheeks. Four transformative games later, Nina Day was crying happy tears as she embraced family members. Day joins Urban Meyer, Tressel, Woody Hayes and Paul Brown in the select fraternity of national champion coaches at Ohio State. They can never take that away from him, no matter what his record is against Michigan. He took the burden he’d been carrying and threw it away last night, hurling it off like his headset and walking away a winner.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Ohio State’s Four-Game Stampede to CFP National Championship Vanquishes All Doubt.