Schadenfreude: Ohio State media down bad over loss to Michigan football

We all know Jim Harbaugh’s famous comment about Ryan Day being born on third base and thinking he hit a triple. We dismissed it at the time as a lunatic coach trying to disparage a rival. I never entertained the thought that he might actually be right in his assessment of Day.

Fast forward to today and I believe Harbaugh is right. Day was handed Urban Meyer’s team with Urban Meyer’s players and that’s how he won in 2019. That’s how he made the National Championship Game in 2020. Since then, it’s been three straight losses to TTUN.

This is firmly Day’s program with his players. These are the guys he’s recruited to fit what he wants to see out of this team. What has that resulted in? So far through five full seasons, he has two Big Ten championships, no national championships, and just one win against Michigan.

On Saturday, Day lost to Sherrone Moore – not Harbaugh. The Michigan Man missed The Game as he served the remainder of his three-game suspension from the Big Ten, one handed down as a result of an NCAA investigation into allegations of in-person scouting and sign-stealing within the Wolverines’ program.

The conference removed Harbaugh from the sidelines, but that made Day’s performance look even worse. He was outcoached by Moore, who improved to 4-0 as an interim head coach for Harbaugh at Michigan. Day’s comparisons to Cooper, an out-of-state coach who recruited well and won many games but had a 2-10-1 record in The Game, have increased as a result. Day’s impressive recruiting classes, a 56-7 overall record, a 1-3 mark in The Game — the warrant for such a claim is there.

This was The Narrative Game, as I said all week. It’s going to be a very interesting offseason in Ann Arbor, but the narrative coming out of this game was going to swing wildly in one direction or another. Either desperate Michigan had to start cheating to beat Ohio State or Ohio State simply lacks the right ingredients to compete with this type of Michigan team and sign-stealing or not, Michigan is just better right now. Regardless of what the NCAA does here, it’s going to be a tough pill to swallow inside the WHAC that the narrative for at least the next 370 days is going to be the latter, not the former.

Day has a Michigan Problem. He’s 56-7 in five years at Ohio State. And he has just three Big Ten losses in his entire career. All of them are to That Team Up North.

That’s the only question that matters for Ryan Day’s version of Ohio State, which is now 1-3 against the rivals: Why does this keep happening in late November?

That’s not something that can be corrected in the film room or on a white board. It’s so much bigger. And now Day must wait an entire calendar year to figure out if he has solved it — again.

(…)

But nobody cares if the Buckeyes can play with any team. They need to be able to play with — and beat — one team: Michigan.

It doesn’t matter how it has happened. Just that it has. Ryan Day is staring at three straight losses to Michigan.

Now he has another year to try piecing together exactly why.

What makes Day’s failures in big games so infuriating is he talks so tough heading into games against Michigan or CFP games. How his teams are going to be playing with an edge and how he is going to open things up. Then when the games actually kick off, nothing close to what he says his teams need to do actually happens. I get there is some coach speak in the interviews, but it just feels like Ohio State teams tend to come out flat when it matters most. How this continues to happen is extremely puzzling.

This is a really tough one to swallow.

We found out a month ago about Michigan’s rampant cheating the past two seasons and watched the whole farce slowly play out like a train wreck, from firings to suspensions. Jim Harbaugh spent the day yesterday at home watching with the rest of the plebes, where he’s spent half of the season due to a variety of misdeeds.

This was supposed to be Ryan Day’s opportunity to show that the last two years of losses to Michigan were a blip influenced by ill-gained information and an unlevel playing field. Heck, that part is probably still true, but the way to make sure that history remembered it as such was for Ohio State to win THIS game.

(…)

There’s so much to unpack here, but the biggest question coming out of all of this is simple.

How many times can Ryan Day lose to Michigan and keep his job?

Ohio State changed who it was in this game, and that’s what got them beat. For Day, the loss was as simple as not winning the turnover battle and not winning the rushing yards battle.